Triton (Trouble on Triton) (21 page)

It was the first Bron had heard of the computer course, which was annoying. On the other hand, there were some things about Alfred Lawrence didn’t know (if Lawrence thought Alfred could possibly go professional), which pleased him. Annoyance conflicting with pleasure produced a noncommittal grunt.

“You know,” Sam said, fanning the cards, “you are a patronizing bastard, Lawrence.”

Which increased Bron’s pleasure.

“I guess Mars is the only place where it
is
legal on the scale
he’d
need,” Lawrence went on, oblivious. “And of course he
can’t
go to Mars or Earth or anywhere like that, because of the war.”

Bron looked at their joint hand, reached over and reversed two of the cards. Sam said: “Lawrence, I have to make an official trip to Earth; I’m leaving tomorrow. Do you want to come along? It’s on government credit: you’d have to share my cabin.”

“Lord!” Lawrence protested. “You mean be shut up in the same five-by-five with you while we fell into the sun, with the hope that a very small ocean on a very small world just
happened
to be in the way?

No, thank you! I’d be crawling the walls!”

Sam shrugged and glanced at Bron. “You want to come?”

“Not with you.” Bron was thinking about work, actually—when, with a sting, he remembered that, for the next two weeks, he didn’t have any work. A trip away from this whole, mean, depressing moon?

What better way to wipe
her
out of mind. “You could always take Alfred.” He wished Sam would ask again.

“Ha!” Sam said, without humor. “Let Lawrence work on him for another two hundred and fifty years. No ... the experience would be good for the kid. But I’ve got an entourage quota this trip—and there
is
the rest of the party coming along to consider. I need somebody fairly presentable, who can be at least vaguely sociable; and can also entertain themselves if they have to. You two, yes. Alfred, I’m afraid—” Sam shook his head.

“Why
don’t
you go, Bron?” Lawrence asked.

“Why don’t you?” Bron asked back, trying to sound sociable; it had a vaguely sullen ring.

“Me? Cooped up together with
that
body?” Lawrence studied the board. “It’s bad enough just trying to keep my self-control watching it loll around here in the commons. No; masochism no longer interests me, I’m afraid.”

“Well, it’s not—” (Sam had separated three cards out, apparently having decided on the first meld)—“as if I were born with it.”

“No, you go with him, Bron,” Lawrence said. “I’m just too old for hopping around the Solar System. And in time of plague to boot.”

“If I go, who’ll play your silly game?”

“Lawrence can teach Alfred,” Sam said.

“Perish the thought ... there’s as much chance of my teaching Alfred vlet as there is of Sam’s taking him to Earth. I think our objections are about the same.”

“We’ll be leaving tomorrow morning,” Sam said. “We’ll be back in twelve days. You’ll still have a couple of days back here to do nothing in, before you have to get back to work at—”

“How did you—?”

“Hey!” Lawrence said. “You
don’t
have to knock the board onto the floor!” He reset two pieces that Bron, starting, had overturned.

Sam, still looking at the cards, had that mocking smile, “Sometimes the government’s right.” His glance flicked up. “You coming?”

“Oh, all right.” Bron reached over and pulled out the four-car4 meld in the high Flames Sam had overlooked; which, for the first half hour of play, at any rate, gave them a decided advantage—before Lawrence, by adroit manipulation of all the gods and astral powers, regained his customary edge. It was as if someone suddenly turned off the sensory shield.

To the left, jagged methane faces made scenery wild as that of some thousand ice-operas. To the right the gritty rubble, which made ninety-six percent of Triton one of the dullest landscapes in the Solar System, stretched to the horizon.

They sped between, inside the clear conveyer tunnel. London Point dragged away behind. Sharp stars pierced the black.

Settled in his seat, with the two curved canopies of clear plastic over them (the stationary one of the car, and the tunnel above rushing backward at one hundred seventy-five kilometers an hour), Bron turned to the left (Sam was also sitting there), thought about ice-farmers, and asked: “I still wonder why you decided to take
me.”

“To get you off my back,” Sam said affably. “Maybe it’ll lead you to some political argument that seriously challenges my own position. Right now, though, yours is so immature there’s nothing I
can
say to you, except make polite noises—however much those noises might sound to you like ideas. This way you’ll have a chance to see just the tiniest fraction of the government close up and check out what it’s doing. The government usually
is
right. In my experience that ‘usually’ is ninety-nine percent with lots more nines after the decimal point. I don’t know: maybe seeing a bit of the real thing will waylay your fears and shut you up. Or it may send you off screaming. Scream or silence, either’ll be more informed. Personally, with you, I’ll find either a relief.”

“But you have your educated opinion which direction I’m likely to go, don’t you?”

“That’s your fmeducated guess.”

Bron watched ice-crag pull away from ice-crag, kilometers beyond Sam’s shoulder. “And the government really doesn’t mind if you take me along? Suppose I find out some confidential top-secret information?”

“The category doesn’t even exist any more,” Sam said.
“Confidential
is the most restricted you can get; and you can see that in any ego-booster booth.”

Bron frowned. “People have been smashing the booths,” he said, pensively. “Did the government tell you that?”

“Probably would have if I’d asked.”

Broken glass; torn rubber; his own face distorted in the bent chrome slip: the image returned, intense enough to startle: “Sam, really—why
does
the government want someone like me along on a trip like this?”

“They don’t want you. I want you. They just don’t mind my taking you along.”

“But—”

“Suppose you
do
find out something—though what that could be I don’t even know. What could you
do
with it? Run shrieking through the streets of Tethys, rending your flesh and rubbing ies in the wounds? I’m sure there’s a sect that’s into that already. We simply live in what the sociologists call a politically low-volatile society. And as I think I said: the political volatility of people who live in single-sex, nonspecified sexual-preference co-ops tends to be particularly low.”

“In other words, given my particular category, my general psychological type, I’ve been declared safe.”

“If you want to look at it that way. You might, however, prefer to express it a little more flatteringly to yourself: We trust most of our citizens in this day and age not to do anything
too
stupid.”

“Both sets of words still model the same situation,” Bron said. “Metalogics, remember? Hey, you know, before I left Mars and came to Triton to be a respectable metalogician for a giant computer hegemony, I was a male hustler in the bordellos of Bellona’s Goebels. But then I got these papers, see ... What does your government, out here where both prostitution and marriage are illegal, think about
thatV

Sam pushed his soft-soled, knee-high boots out into the space between the empty seats. “Before /

came to Triton, I was a rather unhappy, sallow-faced, blonde, blue-eyed (and terribly myopic) waitress at Lux on Ia-petus, with a penchant for other sallow, blonde, blue-eyed waitresses, who, as far as the young and immature me could make out then, were all just gaga over the six-foot-plus Wallunda and Katanga emigrants who had absolutely infested the neighborhood; I had this very high, very useless IQ

and was working in a very uninspiring grease-trough. But then I got this operation, see—?”

Bron tried not to look shocked.

Sam raised an eyebrow, gave a small nod.

“Did you find it a satisfactory transition?” Sex changes were common enough, but since (as Bron remembered some public channeler explaining) some of the “success” of the operation might be vitiated by admission, one did not hear about specific ones frequently.

Sam gave a dark, thick-lipped leer. “Very. Of course, I was much younger then. And one’s tastes shift, if not exactly change. Still, I visit the old neighborhood ...” (Bron thought: Family man, high-powered, big, black, and handsome Sam ... ?) “The point is: the government,” Sam went on, in a perfectly reasonable tone (in which Bron now found himself listening for the lighter overtones in that security-provoking bass), “is simply not interested in my rather common sexual history or your rather peculiar one. And you
had
told me about your whoring days. I admit, I was surprised the first time. But shock value diminishes with repetition.”

“You hadn’t told
me,’9
Bron said, sullenly.

Sam raised the other eyebrow. “Well ... you never asked.”

Bron suddenly didn’t feel like talking any more, unsure why. But Sam, apparently comfortable with Bron’s moody silences, settled back in his (her? No, “his.” That’s what the public channels suggested at any rate) seat and looked out the window.

They sped through the dim, glittering landscape of green ice, gray rock, and stars. Perhaps a kilo away, Bron saw something he thought was the Space Port that Sam said wasn’t. A minute later Sam pointed out at something he said was.

“Where?” Bron couldn’t see.

“Over there. You can just catch a glimpse of the
edge,
right between those two whatyamacallits.”

“I still can’t tell where you’re—” at which point they plunged into covered tunnel; lights came on in the car. The engine whine intruded on Bron’s awareness by lowering pitch. They slowed. They stopped. Then it was green, pastel corridors and opulently-appointed waiting rooms that, while you had a drink and were introduced to people—the rest of Sam’s entourage—trundled quietly along invisible tracks, were hauled up unseen lifts—people laughed and glanced down at the geometrically patterned carpet when, once, the floor shook—and you were guided to the proper door by the little colored lights and the people in the party who were obviously old hands at this sort of thing. (There was no one resembling a steward around; but Bron wasn’t sure if that was “standard tourist” or just “government.”) He was enthusiastically telling someone who appeared to be enthusiastically listening about his own emigration trip to the Outer Satellites twelve years back, which “... let me tell you, was a different matter entirely. I mean, the whole three thousand of us were drugged to the gills through the whole thing: and what fa in this drink, anyway—” when he realized, in the midst of laughing, that six months ... six
weeks
from now, he probably would never think of any of these affable George’s and Angela’s and Aroun’s and Enid’s and Hotai’s again. I mean, he thought, it’s a political mission: nobody’s even
mentioned
politics! I haven’t even asked Sam what the mission fa! Is that, he wondered as they walked along another corridor (some of the group were riding smoothly on the moving strip down the corridor’s side; others ambled beside it, chatting and laughing) what Sam meant by politically low-volatile?

In one of the larger, more opulent, mobile rooms, with luxurious reclining chairs on its several, carpeted levels, there were more drinks, more music, more conversation ...

“This is all marvelous, Sam!” someone called out. “But when do we get on the ship?”

Someone else lifted their ankle to check a complex chronometer strapped there: “I believe we’ve been on it for the last two minutes and forty seconds,” which drew a group
Ooooo!
and more laughter.

“Take off in seventeen minutes.” Sam came down the scroll-railed steps. “This is my cabin. Just take any couch you want.”

Over the next ten minutes Bron learned that the blonde, blue-eyed woman on the couch next to Bron’s was part of Sam’s family commune, and that the tan, plump girl, going around saying, “Drugs?

Drugs, everyone?” and clapping her hand to the side of the neck of anyone who smiled and nodded, was their daughter.

“You mean you really can do it
without
drugs?” someone asked.

“Well, Sam means for us to watch the take-off,” the blonde woman said, lying back on her couch and craning around to see the speaker. “So I’d suggest you take them—it can be a little unsettling, otherwise.”

“That’s exactly why I asked,” the other speaker said.

When the plump girl got to Bron’s couch, on an impulse he smiled and shook his head. “No, thank you ...” But her hand clapped him anyway; then she jerked it away and looked distressed:

“Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry—You said ‘No’—!”

“Urn ... that’s all right,” Bron mumbled.

“Well, maybe you didn’t get very
much
—” and she darted off to the next couch. A buzzer sawed through the cabin. A lot of the more opulent things—lighting fixtures, wall sculptures, shelves, ornamental tables—folded up or down or side—

ways into walls, floor, and ceiling. Several of the couches swung around so that they were all facing the same way in the now rather institutional-looking space. The wall before them hummed apart. What had been a corridor before was now a wall-sized window on star-speckled night, cut with a few girders, the tops of a few buildings visible at its bottom.

From the ceiling a screen folded down, its face a-flash with myriad numbers, grids, and graphs. There has never been a spaceship accident more than three seconds past take-off less than 100

percent fatal, Bron recalled—which probably meant he had
not
gotten much of the take-off drugs.

“I always find these trips so exciting—” someone said—“no matter where or how many times I go. I have no
idea
why ...”

Blue numbers (which were becoming more and more prevalent across the screen) he knew were the final navigation check figures. Red numbers (and a whole bunch went from blue to red) meant those figures had been approved and fed into the take-off computer.