Triton (Trouble on Triton) (25 page)

A woman who could have been the older sister of the man who’d served them at the shack led them up wooden stairs to a room where, at the foot of a bed with a blue cover, lay, next to Sam’s, Bron’s yellow plastic luggage sack.

He didn’t really remember laying down.

He remembered wondering, half asleep, whether or not he should enlist Sam’s help in searching out the company’s whereabouts, and if he should do it before or after they ate.

Then he woke, something soft under his chin. He looked down—at the rayon rim of a blue blanket, with white-gold light at the corner of his vision. He turned his eyes toward it; and clamped them against the brilliance.

He pushed the covers off and stood up, blinking. Through the room’s wide-swung shutters, behind the pulsing after-image, red-tiled roofs stretched down the slope. At the horizon, a wedge of sun blazed between two mountains.

Sunset?

He remembered thev’d arrived late afternoon. Much less sore, he felt as if he’d slept a good three hours.

Sam lay sprawled on the other side of the bed in a welter of twisted bedding, bare foot sticking over the end, bare arm hanging off the side, mouth wide and breath growling.

“Sam ... ?” Bron said, softly. “Sam ... we’d better get started if we’re going to get any dinner. Sam—”

Sam said, “Huh—?” and pushed up to one elbow, squinting.

“The sun’s going down ... I don’t know how long I slept, but you said you wanted to get some dinner and I’d like to—”

“It’s five o’clock in the morning!” Sam said and collapsed back on the pillow, turning and tearing up more bedding.

“Oh.” Bron looked out the window again.

The wedge of the sun’s disk
was
getting higher.

“... Oh,” he repeated, looked around the room, then got back into bed, dragging some of the covers loose from the inert body beside him.

He lay there, feeling very alert, wondering if he should get up anyway and explore the dawning town on his own.

And fell asleep wondering.

“In
that
one!”

They had been looking fifteen minutes, now, for a place to have late breakfast.

“Okay,” Sam said, surprised.

But Bron was already pushing in the wooden doors. Sky flared on the long panes. Sam followed him in.

At first Bron thought it was just because they were a theater company that, among the two dozen eating in the room, they seemed so colorful. But he (in his silver shorts, black shirt, and red gloves) and Sam (in his high boots and short blue toga) were quite as outstanding as the actors. Everyone else wore (of the three basic styles) the one that was (basically) dull-colored pants that went down to the ankles and dull-colored shirts that went down to the wrists ... though some wore them rolled up. Still, everyone seemed animated, even friendly. Most were workers from the ar-cheological site. The Spike was raring back in her chair, her hands behind her neck, laughing. Black suspenders crossed her bare shoulders clipped with brass to the red Z. Abstracted from its environment, it was immediately recognizable: a red plastic letter from a u-1
strezt
coordinate sign. Bron saidr^’Hello ...”

The Spike turned. “Hi!” And the smooth laugh. “Someone said they saw you wandering around here yesterday. What’d you do? Follow me all the way from Triton, braving border skirmishes and the danger of battle to reach my side? Come on, sit down—you
and
your handsome friend—and have something to eat.”

A young woman (the one with the glasses he’d seen rubbing her eye on the road; face and hands were much cleaner, but her clothes were just as dirty) cupped her tea in both hands, dusty nails arched against the thick, white crock, and was saying to Charo, who balanced her chin on her knuckles: “I think it’s so wonderful that you people can come and be with us, in spite of this war. It’s an awful war! Just awful!”

“Well, at least—” (From the voice, Bron thought for a moment it was Windy: it was an earthie with a beard and lots of rings, in his ears and on his fingers) “—no one’s fighting it with soldiers.”

“Sit down,” Sam urged Bron from behind. And, to the people on the bench, when no one seemed about to make room, with his most affable grin: “How about spreading out and letting us in here?”

Three people turned their heads sharply, as though astonished. Hesitantly they looked at one another—one even tried to smile and, finally, slid over on the bench: two moved their chairs. It’s as though, Bron thought, their whole response, reaction, and delay times are different. Is that, he wondered, the seed of why they think we’re bumptious barbarians and we think they’re overrefined and mean-spirited? Bron sat on the bench’s end and felt very much an alien in an alien world, while Sam dragged over a chair from somewhere, fell into it, and rared back too.

“Are you going to be digging this morning?” someone asked the Spike.

Who said: “Ha!” That was the rough part of her laugh. She tapped the forelegs of her chair on the floor. “Maybe in a couple of days. But the company organization takes up too much time right now.”

“She’s got to work so the rest of us can go off and dig,” the hirsute Dian called from somewhere down the table.

The girl was saying to Charo: “... without
any
taxes at all? That just seems impossible to me.”

Charo turned her chin on her fist: “Well,
we
were brought up to think of taxes as simply a matter of extortion by the biggest crooks who happen to live nearest to you. Even if they turn around and say, all right, we’ll spend the money on things you can use, like an army or roads, that just turns it into glorified protection money, as far as we’re concerned. I have to pay
you
money so / can live on
my
property; and you’ll socially rehabilitate me if I don’t ... ? Sorry, no thanks. Even if you’re going to use it to put a road by my door, or finance your social rehabilitation program, it’s still extortion—”

“Wait a minute,” the Spike said, leaning forward with both elbows in the table. “Now wait—we’re
not
fighting this war with soldiers: there’s no reason to start using actors and archeologists.” She leaned around Charo: “We just have a far more condensed, and far more highly computerized system than you do here. All our social services, for instance, are run by subscription to a degree you just couldn’t practice on Earth. Or even Mars—”

“But your subscriptions are sort of like our taxes—”

“They are not,” Charo said. “For one, they’re legal. Two, they’re all charges for stated services received. If you don’t use them, you don’t get charged.”

“You’re supposed to have slightly less than one-fifth of your population in families producing children,” the man with the beard and rings said, “and at the same time, slightly over a fifth of your population is frozen in on welfare ...” Then he nodded and made a knowing sound with ra’s that seemed so absurd Bron wondered, looking at the colored stones at his ears and knuckles, if he was mentally retarded.

“Well, first,” Sam said from down the table, “there’s
very
little overlap between those fifths—less than a percent. Second, because credit on basic food,
basic
shelter, and limited transport is automatic—if you don’t have labor credit, your tokens automatically and immediately put it on the state bill—we don’t support
the
huge, social service organizations of investigators, interviewers, office organizers, and administrators that are the main expense of your various welfare services here.” (Bron noted even Sam’s inexhaustible affability had developed a bright edge.) “Our very efficient system costs one-tenth per person to support as your cheapest, national, inefficient and totally inadequate system here. Our only costs for housing and feeding a person on welfare is the cost of the food and rent itself, which is kept track of against the state’s credit by the same computer system that keeps track of everyone else’s purchases against his or her own labor credit. In the Satellites, it actually costs minimally
less
to feed and house a person on welfare than it does to feed and house someone living at the same credit standard who’s working, because the bookkeeping is minimally less complicated. Here, with all the hidden charges, it costs from three to ten times more. Also, we have a far higher rotation of people on welfare than Luna has, or either of the sovereign worlds. Our welfare isn’t a social class who are born on it, live on it, and die on it, reproducing half the next welfare generation along the way. Practically
everyone
spends
some
time on it. And hardly anyone more than a few years. Our people on welfare live in the same co-ops as everyone else, not separate, economic ghettos. Practically nobody’s going to have children while they’re on it. The whole thing has such a different social value, weaves into the fabric of our society in such a different way, is essentially such a different process, you can’t really call it the same thing as you have here.”

“Oh, I can.” The man fingered a gemmed ear. “Once I spent a month on Galileo; and I was on it!”

But he laughed, which seemed like an efficient enough way to halt a subject made unpleasant by the demands of that insistent, earthie ignorance.

Another earthie Bron couldn’t see laughed too:

“Different kinds of taxes. Different kinds of welfare: and both emblems of the general difference, grown up between each economy, that’s gotten us into an economic deadlock that has made for—what did they used to call it in the papers? The hottest cold war in history ... Until they broke down and just started calling it war.”

“It’s an awful war,” the girl said again. “Awful. And / think it’s wonderful that in spite of it vou can be here, with us, like this. I think it’s wonderful, your showing us your theater—I mean. MacLow, Hanson, Kaprow, McDowell, they were all from Earth. And who’s performing their work on Earth today? And I think it’s wonderful that you’re here helping us with the dig.”

Bron wondered where you got food.

Sam, apparently, had asked, because he was coming back across the room with two trays, one of which he slipped in front of Bron, with a grin, and one of which he clacked down at his own place. Bron picked up a cup of what he thought was tea, sipped: broth. The rest of the breakfast was pieces of something that tasted halfway between meat and sponge cake ... a sort of earthie Protyyn. He took another bite and said: “Excuse me, but—?”

The Spike turned.

“... I mean I realize you’ll be busy with the company, but if you have a few minutes, perhaps T could see you ... I mean we might go for a walk. Or something. If you had time.”

She watched him, something unreadable transpiring deep in the muscles of her face. At last she said:

“All right.”

He remembered to breathe.

And turned back to his tray. “Good,” he said, which sounded funny. So he said, “Thank you,” which also wasn’t quite right. So he said, “Good,” again. He had smiled through all three. The rest of breakfast was overridden by impatience for it to be over; the conversation, all tangential to the war, closed him round like the walls of the earthie’s cell where he had spent—but I can’t tell her about that!

The thought came, sudden and shocking.

Sam said I mustn’t mention that to anyone!

Of course, that must mean her too ...
especially
her, if she was here on a government invitation. From then on his thoughts were even more alien and apart. What
was
there, then, to talk to her about, tell her about, ask her support for, her sympathy in, her opinion of?

It was the most important thing that had happened to him since he had known her; and Sam’s crazed paranoia had put it outside conversational bounds.

Wooden chair legs and bench cleats scraped the planks; diggers got up to go. Bron followed the Spike to the porch, wondering what he
would
say.

Sam was still inside, still talking, still eating, still explaining—
just
like in the co-op. The door closed behind them. Bron said:

“I just can’t get over the coincidence: running into you like this! What are there, now? Three billion people on Earth? I mean to have just met you in Te-thys and then, on the other side of the Solar System, just on a side trip to—where are we? Mongolia! To run into you ... just like that! The chances must be billions to one!”

The Spike breathed deeply, looked around the square, at the mountains beyond the housetops, at the cloud-smeared sky that, by day, was infinitely higher than the night’s star-pocked roof.

“I mean,” he said, “it could be a million billion to one! A
billion
billion!”

She started down the porch steps, glanced at him. “Look, you’re supposed to be something of a mathematician.” She smiled a faint smile, with faintly furrowed brows. “With the war, there’re only a dozen—no, nine, actually—places on Earth a moonie
can
officially go—unless you’re on one of those inane political missions you’re always reading about in subversive flyers and never hearing mentioned on the channels. All of those nine places are as out of the way as this one, at least five hundred miles from any major population center. Our company’s part of an exchange program between warring—or, in Triton’s case, nearly warring—worlds so that
all
cultural contact isn’t cut off: The first place they suggested we go was a cunning little village just on the south side of Drake’s Passage—mean annual temperature minus seventeen degrees centigrade. Frankly, I doubt if more than three of the specified areas are even
livable
at any given time of Earth’s year. None of the nine has a population of more than fifteen hundred. And in a town of fifteen hundred, it’s hard for two strangers who come into it
not
to learn of each other’s presence inside of six hours! Given the fact that both of us
are
on Earth at the same time, and that both of us
are
moonies of our particular temperament and type, I’d say the chances of our running into one another were—what? Fifty-fifty? Perhaps slightly higher?”

He wanted to say: But I’m
on
one of those political missions! And I have been taken prisoner, questioned, beaten, abused—