Triton (Trouble on Triton) (20 page)

Bron turned in the quiet hallway, walked across to his own room, pulling off his gloves—for a moment he looked at his own, colorful, well-cared-for fingers—took off his mask, and shouldered inside.
4. La Geste D’helstrom

/ think that a philosophical gnat might claim that the gnat society is a great society, or at least a good society, since it is the most egalitarian, free, and democratic society imaginable,

—Karl R. Popper,
Objective Knowledge

The melancholy left after three more hour’s sleep.

The energy (and vividness) remained all the way to work, till, by three o’clock (he’d skipped lunch), when he was going over the Day Star’s preprogram specifications yet again, it hit him: P would have to intersect
less
than half of Not-P (as well as pieces of Q, R, and S, while cleaving T); also it must surround
more
than half of it; and be tangent to it at not less than seven (which had been self-evident) and not more than forty-four (which had been the bitch!) points.
That
was getting somewhere. Immensely pleased, he marched to Audri’s office with his find.

“Great,” Audri said, looking up from her desk. “For a reward you get a two-week vacation.”

Bron said, “Mmmm?”

Audri leaned back and put her hands behind her head. “I said you get two weeks off, starting tomorrow.”

“I don’t under—” Suddenly he remembered some vague thing she’d said yesterday about

“threatening”: “Hey,
look,
now! That girl
got
another job. I mean, I saw her, later, and she’s all right!”

Audri frowned. “What girl are you—Oh, for crying out loud, Bron! Don’t give me any of your hard-time crap.” Her hands came down on the desk. “I can’t take it today. People are being laid off all over the whole hegemony. If you’d been at lunch, you’d’ve heard!”

“Well, I didn’t
want
lunch,” he protested, automatically. “I wanted to work. That’s how I got the—”

She stopped him with lightly closed lids. “Look.” They opened. “You can either take a two-week vacation with eight percent reduction in credit for the duration—”

“Eight
percent!”

“—or quit. Half a dozen people have. I’ve got to take ten days off myself. And, I’ve got to think of something to do with the kids.”

Although Bron liked Audri, he
didn’t
like her three children. When, from time to time, they came to the office, he found them precocious, presumptuous, and obdurate. She lived with them in a gay, women’s co-op (not a commune—room, food, and work arrangements were friendly but formal) in an unpretentious spiral tower a unit from Bron’s own squat, blocky building. With none of the laminated ostentation of Philip’s mul-tisexed, on-the-Ring dwelling, nor the insistently tatty quaintness of a u-1

sector domicile, it was the most comfortable home he had visited on Tethys. All three visits, in fact had left him strangely relaxed and, strangely, depressed—but it had taken him three visits to realize they
were

two reactions.

Bron swallowed (and forgot) his next protest.

“We don’t have to get hysterical yet, I suppose,” Audri said. “It’s
only
eight percent—this time. And just for two weeks. They want to make everything look like its working at full capacity, only that people just all happen to be off doing something else.”

“What sort of logic—or metalogic—is that?”

“I have three degrees in this subject and am in the midst of getting another one—which is three more than you—and / don’t have the foggiest idea.” Audri leaned her palms on the desk edge. “Look. Just get out of here. If you come up with any more on Day Star this afternoon, shove it under Phil’s or my door. But don’t bother us. Okay? And don’t come in tomorrow.”

Wonderingly, he said (he hadn’t meant it to, but it sounded a little belligerent): “Okay ...” and returned to his office.

He thought many confused thoughts, and didn’t even bother to open the Day Star folder again. The energy was gone by the time he returned to Serpent’s House. Sitting in the commons, alone in a conversation niche, he reread the flyer picked up that morning from the booster-booth’s floor:

“THESE THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN YOUR CITY!!!”

But, as he absorbed each political atrocity, he kept thinking of other things not happening in the city: like the performances of the little micro-theater troupe; and its director, who was no longer a resident. In a way he would not have dared define, it made the atrocities worse.

“You want to continue from where we left off?” Sam put the case up on the table and sat. “Lawrence said to set up the pieces as best we remembered, and
he’d
come down in ten minutes and make corrections.” Sam thumbed back brass claws, opened out the board.

Bron said: “Sam, how do you reconcile working for the government with the appalling political situation on Triton?”

Sam raised an eyebrow.

Between them micro-waves lapped, micro-breezes blew, micro-trees bent, and micro-torrents plashed and whispered down micro-rocks.

“I mean, there you are in the—what is it? Liaison Department? Political commitment isn’t a perimeter, Sam; it’s a parameter. Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you ever doubt?”

“What great metaphysical crisis have
you
just been through that’s suddenly gotten all your angst up?”

“We’re not talking about
me.
I asked you a question.” So as not to face the answer, Bron opened the case’s side drawer, removed the transparent plates of the astral cube and began to assemble them on their brass stilts. When he did glance up, Sam was regarding him seriously, the cards in his dark fingers halted in midshuffle. A corner of the White Novice showed, curved against Sam’s darkly pinkish palm.

“Yes.” The White Novice fell. “I doubt.” Fifty cards fell, riffling, after it. “Frequently.” For a moment, a little laughter shook, silent, behind Sam’s face; Sam’s eyes went back to the cards. He parted the pack, shuffled again.

“Come on.
What
do you doubt?”

“I doubt if someone like you could really be asking me a question like that for purely autonomous reasons.”

Bron pulled out the other side drawer of velvet-cradled ships, warriors, horsemen, herdsmen, and hunters. “There
are
no autonomous reasons. Whatever makes the question come up in my mind, the fact that it
is
in my mind is what makes it
my
question. It still stands.” He picked up the screen showing the horned head of Aolyon (cheeks puffed with hurricane winds) and set it, on its tiny base, upon the waters—which immediately darkened about it; green troughs and frothing crowns rolled about the little stretch of sea.

Sam put down the pack, reached into the control drawer and turned a survey knob. From the side-speaker came a crack and crackle over rushing wind, followed by a mumbling as of crumbled boulders. “That’s quite a storm ... were there any sea-monsters in there? I don’t remember—”

“What do you doubt?” Bron picked up his own scarlet Beast and set it on the rocky ledge, where it lowered over at the narrow trail winding the chasm below.

“All right.” Sam sat back to watch Bron set out tiny figures. “One thing I’ve been worrying about since the last evening we all played this game—”

“—the night of the gravity cut.” Bron thought: The night of the day I met
her.
He picked up green pieces and set them by river, rock, and road.

“At the Department, we knew something was going to happen that night. The cut wasn’t a surprise. I guess it was pretty clear to the rest of you, too, I wasn’t surprised ... But they told us only a few people would go out to see.”

Bron glanced up: Sam was turning a transparent die between dark forefinger and thumb.

“They had it all figured—statistics, trends, tendencies, and a really bizarre predictive module called the ‘hysteria index’ all said that practically no one would want to go out to see the sky ... As far as they can tell, eighty-six percent of Tethys’ population was outside within a minute and ten seconds, one way or the other, of the cut.”

“What’s to doubt there?”

“They were wrong.” Sam got an odd expression. “I don’t suppose I have any illusions about our government’s being a particularly moral institution. Though it’s more moral than a good many others have been in the past. Nor do I think for a moment that any of the accusations in that piece of trash you were just reading—” He nodded toward the leaflet, which had fallen to the orange rug; somehow the table leg had worked onto (or the paper under) it at the corner—“are particularly exaggerated. The worst you can say is that they’re out of context. The best you can say is that they
are
emblems of the political context that gives them what meaning they have. But up until now—and this probably strikes you as quite naive—it never occurred to me that the government could be
wrong,
.. about its facts and figures, its estimates and its predictions. Up until now, when a memo came down that said people, places, incidents would converge at set times and in given ways, they did. The last memo said less than two percent of the population would go out. They’d be too scared. Over
eighty
percent went out. That’s more than a ninety-five percent error. You may say it wasn’t an error about anything important. But when you’re on the edge of a war, a ninety-five percent error about
anything
just doesn’t bolster confidence in your side. So I’ve been doubting.”

“Sam, Earth has committed major atrocities on Luna, and allied herself with Mars for the all-out economic domination of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons, big and little alike. Neriad has already said she’ll go with us; and Triton stands on the edge of the whole business, waiting to plunge into one of the most sense—

less and destructive conflicts in human history—we’ve been splattered with gore and filth in a hundred ways already: the night of the gravity cut may have been
the
most flamboyant splash—I doubt if any one of us, even you, can assess the damage compared to—”

“Well,” Sam said, one sparse eyebrow lowered, one corner of his full mouth raised, “it’s not as if anyone were using soldiers,” and let his expression break into a mocking, voiceless laugh.

“Some of your best friends are probably Jewish too,” Bron said. The cliche about soldiers had been devalued rather like (an eccentric elderly woman Bron used to visit in the u-1 had once explained to him)

“law and order” had been devalued two centuries before. “So this one is all buttons and spies and sobotage, and only civilians get killed—those that aren’t thrown out of a job by the economic wangling, or don’t fall off the roof during a gravity cut—because that’s all there are.”

“You know—” Sam came forward again, to set scarlet’s caravan, one piece after the other, on the jungle trail—“one of the reasons I moved into this place was so I wouldn’t have to put up with six hours a day of political interrogation.”

Bron fished out the last cargo ship from the drawer and positioned it at the edge of the storm—immediately it began to doff and roll. “Yeah? The government told you that you had a ninety nine point nine nine nine percent chance of only finding nonpolitical types in this type co-op? Well, maybe I’m just that odd and inexplicable point oh oh oh oh oh one percent they call an individual—”

“No. You’re a type like the rest of us.”

“—or maybe the government’s just—” Bron turned up his hands and shrugged—“wrong again ... ?”

He meant it be annoying.

But Sam was apparently finished with being annoyed. He laughed out loud. “Maybe—” and began to place the screens.

“Hello, Alfred.” Lawrence’s voice came loudly and cheerfully from the middle of the room. Bron and Sam looked up.

Across the commons, Alfred hurried toward the balcony stairs.

“I said, ‘Hello, Alfred,’” Lawrence (who had apparently been on his way to join the game) repeated. One wrinkled fist rested on his parchment-pale hip.

Alfred, at the steps’ foot, a hand on the banister, twisted around. On his black suspender straps large, red letters sagged, behind and before. “Urn ...” he said. “Oh ... Ummm ...” He half-nodded, then darted up, ‘Q’ scarlet between his shoulder blades.

Lawrence came over. “The horrible thing is, he’s improving. I’ve been going through this every day now for—what is it? Four months? If you speak to him twice, now, loudly and distinctly, he’ll actually
look
at you. Pauses even. Sometimes even grunts a little. And the general behavior syndrome is no longer that of
complete
inarticulate terror. The first thirty times, by count, he just pointed his nose straight ahead and ran faster. At this rate, I estimate, he
may
reach the state of acceptable human animal—not outstanding, mind you: just acceptable—in, oh, perhaps two hundred and fifty years.” Lawrence came around the table, regarding the board. “Even with regeneration treatments, he won’t last that long. Mmm

... I see there’s a war on.”

Bron sat back. “Why don’t you just lay off him ... leave him alone.”

Lawrence grunted and sat next to Sam, who moved over for him. “Sam and I are the best friends
either
of you two ambient social disaster areas ever had. By the way, when are you going to break down and fuck me?”

“Do you proposition Alfred in the same, warmhearted, friendly manner, from time to time?”

“Heaven forbid!” Lawrence turned a switch; the grid flickered over the board. “That’s at least
three
hundred years off. / may not last that long!” which cracked Sam up, though Bron didn’t think it was so funny. Lawrence pulled at the wrinkled folds under his chin, then reached out and adjusted two Queens.

“I think those were there, actually. Otherwise, the two of you
seem
to have done pretty well. All right, now—Get away from me! Get away—!” That was to Sam, who was still laughing. “You’re both playing against me now—don’t think by sidling up like that you’ll get any advantages.” Bron found himself remembering
the
Spike’s comment on political homosexuals ... Sam changed his seat. Lawrence picked up the pack and dealt. “With all the girls Alfred is constantly sneaking into his room—and why he feels he has to sneak, / shall never know—he should give up that ridiculous computer course his social worker’s had him training at for the last two months—I mean, he doesn’t like it and won’t finish it—and go to Earth, or someplace where it’s legal, and become a prostitute.” Lawrence nodded knowingly toward Bron. “Doing it on an accepted basis for a while might be exactly what he needs, don’t you think?”