Triton (Trouble on Triton) (12 page)

“So you
could
choose just to go to bed with attractive women if you wanted—”

He shook his head, wondering if she were kidding. “Look, if you were the kind of guy who could only get it on with the nubile nymphs on the daytime video romances, really, you just wouldn’t be too likely to apply for the job. When I got hired, I was down for all women with physical deformities. For some reason, a scar or a withered arm or leg always gets me off; which made me quite useful. And older women, of course; and dark skin; and big hips; I was also down for what they called second-level sadism.”

“My Lord,” she said. “What’s that? No, don’t tell me! Did women prostitutes
get
the same, deluxe treatment—performance forms and the like?”

“Female prostitution is illegal on Mars—oh, of course there was a lot of it around. Probably as much of it as there was the male kind, just in numbers. But because it was pretty harried by the e-girls ... eh, e-men, if any single-establishment got near the size of one of the male houses, it was raided, broken up, and closed down. So you just couldn’t get things quite to the same level of organization. But I got special credit exemptions and preferred ratings on standard government loans for each uninterrupted six-months period I worked—of which, incidentally, in three and a half years there were only two. It’s the kind of job you take vacations from a lot.” He put his hand on the back of her neck, rubbed. “Now, on Earth, female prostitution is government-licensed in most places and male prostitution is illegal. The oddest thing: some of the big men that ran the Flesh Pit—and about half the other houses in the Goebels—went to Earth and set up Earth-licensed houses of female prostitution in various cities there, using the same techniques they’d developed on Mars for the male houses—screening the prostitutes, getting their performance charts and preferences. Apparently, they’ve cleaned up! Earth’s oldest profession was also one of its most shoddily run, until
they
came along—or so they tell you on Mars. I worked with a couple of guys who’d free-lanced various places on Earth, illegally.” He sighed. “They had some peculiar stories.”

“Worlds must be very peculiar places.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t really the only reason we’re at war with them.”

“Or about to be at war with them. Triton, anyway.”

The Spike’s head came up. Her hair feathered the edge of his hand. “Small dark women with big hips and withered arms—” She glanced at him. “Someday you must tell me what you see in a big-boned, scrawny blonde like me.”

“They’re mutually inclusive areas, not mutually exclusive. And they include quite a bit more ...” He nuzzled her shoulder and wondered much the same thing she’d just asked; his mind, used to such meander-ings, had only been able to come up with a sort of generalized incest, or even narcissism, the denial of which was the reason for those other tastes, now (interestingly), broken through.

“Of course,” the Spike said, “the whole thing sounds terribly bizarre, being a prostitute and all.” She looked at him again. “What did your parents think?”

He shrugged; she had broached an uncomfortable area; but he’d always thought honesty a good thing in matters of sex: “I never talked about it with them, really. They were both civic constructionist computer operators—light laborers to you folks out here. They were pretty glum about everything, and I guess that would have only been something else for them to be glum about.”

“My parents—” she said, yawning, “all nine of them—are Ganymede ice-farmers. No cities for them. They’re good people, you know? But they can’t see further than the next methane thaw. Now they’d be quite happy if I’d gone into commiters, like you—or Miriamne. But the theater, I’m afraid, is a little beyond them. It’s not they
disapprove,
you know ... it’s just ...” She shook her head.

“My parents—and they were only the two—didn’t disapprove. We just didn’t discuss it. That’s all. But then, we didn’t discuss much of anything.”

She was still shaking her head. “Ice-sleds, checking vacuum seals on this piece of equipment, that piece, always looking at the world through polarized blinkers—good solid people. But ... I don’t know: limited.”

Bron nodded, to end, rather than continue. These u-1 folk
would
talk about their pasts, and, more unsettling, nudge you to talk. (The archetypal scene: The ice-farm Matriarch saying to the young Earth man with the dubious past [or Patriarch saying to the equally dubious young Mars woman]: “We don’t care about what you done, just what you do—and even that, once you done it, we forget it.”) In the licensed area of the city, this philosophy seemed—within reason—to hold. But then, what was the u-1

for, if not to do things differently in? “Now you see,” Bron said, “that seems romantic to me, growing up in the untamed, crystalline wilderness. I used to go to every ice-opera they’d run at the New Omoinoia; and when they’d rerun them on the public channels, a year or so later, I kept an awful lot of clients waiting downstairs while I found out how Bo Ninepins was going to get the settlers out from under another methane slide.”

“Ha!” She flung herself on the bed. “You did? So did my folks. They loved them! You’ve probably seen part of our farm—the ice-opera companies were always using our south acres to do location shooting. It was the only farm within six hundred miles of G-city that had any place on it that looked like it
could
have been in an ice-opera! Maybe hanging around the shooting company was where I got my first prod toward the theater—who knows? Anyway, we must have burrowed down to the Diamond Palace once a month from the time I was twelve, the whole lot of us. Like going to a religious meeting, I swear. Then they’d stay up till one o’clock in the morning, drinking and complaining about the details that the picture people had gotten wrong
this
time. And be right there for the next one next month—now
that’s
what my folks think of as theater: noble old loner Lizzie Ninepins saving the settlers from the slide, or virile young Pick-Ax Pete with his five wives and four husbands carving a fortune out from a methane chasm ...” She laughed. “It was a beautiful landscape to grow up in—at least the south acres was—even if you never saw it without a faceplate between you and the vacuum. Now if I ever directed an ice-opera, my folks would think I’d arrived! Government subsidized micro-theater, indeed! I suppose I’ve had a secret urge to, ever since my name day ... I chose the name of a mother of mine I’d never known, who’d got killed in an ice-slide before I was born.” The Spike laughed. “Now I bet you’ve seen
that
one in a dozen ice-operas! / certainly had.” (Bron smiled. In the Satellites, children were given only a first name at birth—about half the time the last name of one of their genetic parents, government serial numbers doing for all official identification. Then, at some coming-of-age day, they took a last name for themselves, from the first name of someone famous, or in honor of some adult friend, workmate, or teacher. Naming age was twelve on the moons of Saturn, fourteen on the moons of Jupiter; he wasn’t sure what it was here on Triton, but he suspected it was younger than either. On Earth last names still, by and large, passed down paternally. On Mars, they could pass either paternally or maternally. His father’s last name was Helstrom; if, as by now he was sure was pretty unlikely, he ever joined a family out here, Helstrom would be the

[first] name of his first son.) The Spike laughed again, this time muffling the sound in his armpit. Then her head came up. “Do you know what Miriamne really said about you?”

Bron rolled to his side. “She
didn’t
say I was trying hard?”

“She said that you were a first-class louse
but
that you were trying hard. She told me this terrible story about how you—” She stopped. Her eyes widened. “Oh dear! I forgot ... you’re
her
boss—she’s not yours. The last job she had, she was a production fore—

man for a cybralog manufacturing compound ... Well,
now
I’ve done it!” She shook her head. “I’ve never worked in an office, and I ... forgot.”

Bron smiled. “What was the horrible story she told?”

“As she was running out of here, she blurted out something about you making some personnel receptionist’s life miserable on the phone just to impress her as a first step to getting in her pants.”

Bron laughed. “I guess she had
my
number!”

“If that’s what you were doing, you mustn’t hold it against her.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t.” He nuzzled again, closing his arms around her. “You know about the prostitute’s heart of gold, lying around underneath it all?”

“Ah, but gold can be a very cold, heavy metal.” Her head turned on his shoulder. “Do you think being a prostitute was helpful?”

He shrugged, cradling her. “I think it makes you surer of yourself when you’re actually
in
bed—not necessarily a better lover—but a more relaxed one.”

“You have,” she said toward the ceiling, “a certain pyrotechnical flair that, I admit, I admire the hell out of.”

“On the other hand, I don’t know if it does anything for the relationship part of a sexualizationship. Maybe it’s having so much sex right there, and not having to walk further than downstairs to the client lounge to get it, and it’s paying the bills to boot—I guess when you finally
gQt
out into the real world and find that people are as interested in you as they are in your technique—
and
expect you to be interested in them too—it takes some adjusting to. Maybe I never have. Lasting sexualizationships just aren’t my strong point ... no!” He looked down at the top of her head. “That isn’t the way I feel at all! Isn’t it funny how we always say the cliche thing, even if we don’t believe it! No. I don’t think it hurt me in any way, at all. Some of it was pleasant. Some of it was unpleasant. And it was all a long time ago. But I learned a hell of a lot, about myself, about people. Perhaps I never had much of a bent for relationships, even as a kid; which is why I went into prostitution in the first place. But it’s certainly made me a lot more tolerant of a lot more different types of people than most ordinary Martians—say most of my clients. What I learned there is probably the only thing that made it possible for me to adjust—however badly I’ve done it—to emigrating out here to the Satellites ... where you—how do they put it?—can’t make a redressable contract across either a sexual or a sectarian subject.”

“That’s right,” she mused. “Marriage is legal on Mars too. For some reason, we only think of that in terms of Earth out here.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Though if what you said about relationships not being your forte is true, the other thing you said still makes sense, even if it is a cliche. Well, what does
any
type of life really fit you for today? I’m damned if I know what life in the theater has done for—” The door flew in, crashing against the wall. Bron jerked up on his elbow to see two bare feet, with frayed cuffs fallen away from red-haired calves, waving in the air. The acrobat (Windy?) walked in on his hands. In the hall, somebody was playing the guitar.

Bron was about to say something about knocking first when a little girl (perhaps six? perhaps seven?) on very thick-soled shoes and draped in a trailing, tattered veil of sequins, ran into the room, leapt on the bed (her knee bruised his thigh), weeping, and flung herself into the Spike’s arms; the Spike shrieked,

“Oh, my goodness ... !” and, to Bron’s astonishment (he was sitting on the bed’s edge now, both feet on the warm plastifoam floor), began to weep, herself, and cuddle the grubby-fingered creature.

“Hey, I was just wondering if you—” That was the hirsute, half-blind woman with the mastectomy, leaning in the door. Astonishment bloomed over her scarred face. “Oh, I’m sorry!” As she pulled back, two more women—one carrying a ladder, the other a tool case—pushed in.

“Look,” the one with the case said, clanking it on the floor and pushing the catch up with one, very pointy-toed boot, “we’ve got to get this done now. Really. I’m sorry.” The cover clacked open.

“Hey, what—” Bron said (he was standing, now, near the wall) to the knobby ankle waving near his shoulder—“I mean is this just one of your damn micro-theater pieces? Because if it is ...”

“Man,” the head said (which was down at about his knee, a waterfall of red hair all around it sweeping the floor, between splayed, hammy hands), “don’t
ever
live in an
all
woman co-op unless they’re
all
straight, or they’re
all
gay, every last one. It just isn’t worth it, you know what I mean?” The hair shook aside enough to see an ear. “I mean, really!” The hands shifted. The feet swung. The little girl, sitting on top of the ladder now, sniffled.

The last two women who had come in were making marks across the wall with black crayons. The Spike, on the edge of the bed, was pulling up her baggy red trousers, standing and turning (on her back, fastened with the same brass clips, was a red Z, as mysterious as the R in front) and pulling her black suspenders up over her shoulder. She turned back and, knuckling her tear-wet eyes, came over to Bron. “I’m sorry about this, really, I am ... But I just tend to anthropomorphize everything!”

One of the women swung a small sledge against the wall. Cracks zagged out from the blow. The little girl on top of the ladder burst out weeping afresh.

So did the Spike: “... Oh, go
on\
Please, go on. Really!” She gestured behind her with one hand. Tears ran, in three lines, down one cheek, in one down the other. Suddenly she hit at Windy’s foot. “Oh,
stop
sulking and stand up!”

The acrobat’s feet swayed wildly, kicked violently, regained balance. From knee level came a torrent of exotic and specialized profanity that brought back to Bron, with incredible clarity, the face of one particular earthie he had worked with in the Goebels: If Windy had
not
spent time on Earth as an extra-legal, male prostitute, he’d certainly spent a lot of time with men who had!

But the Spike had seized Bron’s arm and was pushing him toward the door, in which the guitarist (Charo?) stood, her instrument high under her breasts, her head bent pensively, her left hand, far up the neck, clutching chord after chord; the outsized muscle between thumb and forefinger on her right hand pulsed as her nails rattled notes into the corridor.