Triton (Trouble on Triton) (31 page)

For three minutes he thought she was hiding. But she had really gone.

He walked back into town and up the narrow stone steps, blades of moonlight from between the small houses sweeping across him every twenty feet. The Taj Mahal, he kept thinking. And: sausages ... ?

The Taj Mahal—would he get to see it after all? He must ask Sam how far away it was—that was much more interesting than Boston. But though he knew all about the clay-pits to the south of it and the story of the queen who died in childbirth buried within it, he wasn’t sure which continent it was on—one of them beginning with “A” ... Asia? Africa? Australia? The Spike had said something, before they’d started to fight, about giving him the astrolabe ... ?

Thinking he held it, he looked at his hands,
but (all
the way back he’d assumed the moist knot in his left
fist was
a crumpled bill he’d been meaning to spread out and put back in his purse) they were both empty.

6. Objective Knowledge

When a man who knows the game watches a game of chess, the experience he has when a move is made usually differs from that of someone else watching without understanding the game. But this experience is not the knowledge of the rules.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Grammar

“Did you have a good time last night?”

“Oh ... yeah. Sure.”

“Well, come on,” Sam said. “We’ve only got five hours to get back. I just spoke to Linda. They’ll be waiting for us.”

“Where?” he said sleepily.

“Nevermind. Just get dressed and come on. Remember, a world’s a little bit bigger than a moon, so you have to allow a little more time to get from one side of it to the other.”

Nevertheless, in the eating place near the town square, they spent a good half hour over breakfast; the single digger also eating there engaged them in a particularly inane conversation: “They’re always telling on the news about all those hundreds of political parties you have on each satellite, out where you guys are from.”

“There’re not hundreds,” Sam said, sipping his broth. “Only about thirty to thirty-seven, depending on which satellite you’re on.”

“And when you have an election, none of them ever wins?”

Bron watched Sam decide to laugh. “No. They all win. You’re governed for the term by the governor of whichever party you vote for. They all serve office simultaneously. And you get the various benefits of the platform your party has been running on. It makes for competition between the parties which, in our sort of system, is both individuating and stabilizing.”

“It sounds pretty confusing.” The digger, who was very dirty and probably about fourteen, grinned. The only reason Bron didn’t say anything insulting was because he couldn’t think of anything. Sam said: “Well, it’s nowhere near as confusing as some of the excuses for government you’ve got here.” But he was still smiling.

Ten minutes later they were walking along the road. Bron frowned at the archeological excavation. Some dozen diggers were clustered around one section (the sun was not the yellow disk on the blue it was always pictured, but a boundaryless, white-gold blot you couldn’t really look at), but not the place, Bron decided at last, where the Spike had hidden her gauntlet. In fact, there was a small earth-mover filling in that section.

Sun flared on the mover’s bubble.

“I believe,” Sam said, “this is going to be what is known, in earthly parlance, as a scorcher—a
very
hot day!”

“What’s the point of having the sun so hot and close if you can’t enjoy it?”

But Sam onlv laughed.

They walked up the rise.

Somewhere in last night’s conversation among the ruins, there had been discussion about when he would see her again. The Spike had given several answers, all negative, all evasive, and most beyond his comprehension.

They walked a while more.

Then they rode.

Then they flew.

Then they flew again; this flight did not quite end. Their compartment had been transferred to rail, now, and was speeding along underground.

Then they were instructed by a speaker to
get
into another compartment; and after speeding along for a while in that one, they were instructed to leave through door B, which put them into a long, low, green corridor, with a moving walkway along one side.

“I think that’s our party.” Sam nodded along the hall, where a group of some dozen ambled ahead.

“We better hurry.”

Walking quickly along the moving walkway, it still took them another two minutes to catch up.

“Oh, hi, Sam!” Linda said with a smile much more surprised than Bron thought the situation warranted. “We were getting worried ...” She looked very tired.

So did most of the others. Some looked downright exhausted.

Was that why some of the people seemed so unfamiliar?

As they passed through the door into the opulent cabin, with its carpeted levels and reclining chairs, Bron realized that at least three people were, indeed, new.

Sam, looking pretty tired himself but, smiling, had an, arm around plump Debby’s shoulders. Someone handed him a drink, and Bron was left with the disconcerting question—since all the chairs were taken—
which
three people were missing.

Take-off was very rough. And it
was
a different cabin—or else the take-off’s screen broken blue lights had been fixed. There was conversation, laughter, gossip, all sounding somewhat strained. Bron wondered if they all had secrets like his. His stint in the earthies’ cell had returned to him with pressing vividness the moment the doors to the room had rolled to. Ten hours out he found himself doubting if the people he’d spotted as new were new after all. Nobody had made particular reference to them, everyone seemed to know them. But five hours later, after checking down in the free-fall cabin, and then surveying the swimmers in the pool, he had definitely identified one of the missing persons. After refilling his drink, Bron walked up to the redhead who had been so garrulous before. The little man was sitting on his couch, his own drink hanging from his bony fingers. Bron said: “By the way, whatever happened to that charming oriental woman you were playing vlet with on the trip out?”

The redhead looked up sharply. He frowned. Then his shoulder dropped, and the exhaustion Bron had become used to on the faces around him worked its way back among the features. “I suspect—”

The little redhead looked down again, turned his drink—“the
chances
are overwhelming she’s dead.”

Which made Bron start. (Someone passing glanced at them, then glanced away.) Chills rolled up his back.

The redhead’s eyes raised. “This
was
a political mission.” His voice was strained and soft. “Many of us were in great danger. All of us were under pressure. And ... well, we
are
at war.” He took a breath, looked out at the stars, and then went on to talk about something else with entirely information-less anecdotes, a style that Bron had noticed twice before. This time Bron commented on it, a bit annoyed. The redhead laughed and explained that he had developed that style of small talk back when he’d been actually working for Intelligence—“That’s where everything you say
is
used against you.”—and then slaughtered Bron three games running on his small-sized, traveling vlet board; mercifully, no game took more than forty minutes. “But I think,” the redhead explained by way of aooeasement, “the next time you play someone else, you’ll find your own game much improved.” Bron had already recognized the beginning of another of those annoying friendships he was so frequently falling into when he fell into any friendship at all. The pattern was only confirmed when the redhead, in one of his anecdotes, mentioned something peculiar about life in some male homosexual commune that had something peculiar about its particular history. And the redhead, Bron realized, was one of those guys who wouldn’t even proposition you outright and give you the satisfaction of telling him to fuck off. Not that Bron ever
said
fuck off; he’d just say, as politely as the situation allowed, No. A couple of times, when he was a kid on Mars, someone had taken his politeness as an invitation to get physical, so that Bron once had to elbow someone in the ribs. (The image of the Spike, elbowing him that night, how many nights ago, in the ruins of Earth, came back to make him grin.) But the physical approach—especially if you were over six feet tall—gets rarer as you get older. (And somehow the obsessive feeling about her had begun to slip away

...) All these thoughts, of course, were not consecutive, but spread over the next seventy hours. Around them and in between them, Bron learned, from overhearing several other conversations and hovering about the edges of several more (trying to think of a leading question, terrified of asking a stupid one), that while Sam had been keeping him off out of harm’s way in Mongolia, indescribable atrocities had occurred, unspeakable retaliations had been committed, and that, though no one could really be surprised, the “we” who were at war now was, yes, Triton.

Sam was explaining to Bron, among half a dozen other, simultaneous conversations, that no, he wouldn’t be returning to the co-op today; he, Linda, and Debby were anxious to get back to the rest of the family in Lux. A voice chirped overhead, in astonishingly low fidelity: “Will Bron Helstrom please go to one of the blue courtesy phones. Will Bron Helstrom please . • J9

Bron excused himself.

“And say hello to the old pirate for me when you get home,” Sam called after him. “Hope you beat the fuzz off his balding pate—”

On the phone (“Yes, what is it?”) they told him there was a letter for him and—Oh, excuse me: apparently it had been already sent on to his co-op. In fact, it had come from Earth with him on the same rocket in which he’d—

“From Earth?”

That’s right, and they were terribly sorry; they were just trying to get it to him quickly, but apparently there’d been some mix-up—

“Well, then why call me all the way to the—?”

Was he on his way home now?

“Yes!”

Well, if it was an emergency and he was passing any postal outlet, if he would just present his identification card, he would be immediately presented with a government facsimile of—

“And what is the government doing with a facsimile of
my
private mail?” (The mail was a co-operative, not a government, enterprise.)

This
is
wartime, they explained testily. And besides, he had just returned from a High Surveillance Mission; as he no doubt knew, that surveillance would continue on High for at least seventy-two hours after his return, for his own protection. Now, would he like to take advantage of it and pick up his letter before he got home?

“Yes!” Bron said. “Thank you!” Hanging up, he turned, angrily, from the phone. The little redhead (who’d made noises about sharing a transport compartment back into Tethys) was the only one waiting.

“Seems I just got a letter from my girlfriend,” Bron explained, realizing as he did so that it might just as easily be (in fact he hoped it was) an official apology from the Earth enforcement-girls (or whatever the hell they called them there) about the way he had been treated. “But they seem to have sent it on ahead by accident.” An apology from the Spike? He smiled. Well, it was to be expected. But really, he didn’t feel she’d done that much to apologize for. “I’ll have to stop off and pick up the letter. I really enjoyed those games. I guess we’ll be running into each other again—Tethys isn’t that big a city, and once you meet someone, you practically can’t get away from them.”

“We probably won’t,” the redhead said with a mischievous smile. “I don’t live in Tethys.”

“Oh,” Bron said. “I thought you said you lived in a—oh, you mean your co-op isn’t
in
the city.”

“That’s right.” And the redhead began to talk animatedly about something else, till they reached the transport. “Oh, and may I ask you a mildly embarrassing favor: Could you pay my fare with one of your to—

kens. It’s only half a franq on your credit; I know it seems silly but—”

“Oh, sure,” Bron said, opening his purse and fingering around for his half-franq token. He pushed the coin-shape into one of the change slots beside the entrance. (There was still some leftover money; but Sam seemed to have forgotten about it.) The green light flashed, and the token rolled out again into Bron’s palm.

“Thank you,” the redhead said, and walked through the gate.

Bron put the token in again; the light flashed again; again the token was returned (and somewhere two fares were billed against his labor credits on some highly surveyed government tape); returning the token to his purse, he followed the redhead onto the transport platform, constructing schemes of paranoid complexity about why the redhead might not want his presence in the city known. After all, basic transportation was a nonrefusable (what the dumb earthies would call “welfare”) credit service. They rode a while together. Then the redhead said good-bye and got off. (Bron’s fantasies had gone to the other extreme by now: the redhead was probably just a skinflint credit cadger. Ex-Intelligence indeed!) Bron realized as the doors closed that actually he had no idea at all
where
the man lived (in some other city? on some other moon?); he didn’t even know his name. Had he actually said
he
was living in the homosexual co-op, or just that
someone
had been living there? It had all been too artfully ambiguous. Forget it! Bron thought: Oh, forget it; he stood up, while the floor swayed, and went to stand at the doors. If he was going to pick up his letter at a postal outlet, before he got home, he’d better do it here:

The transport pulled into the Plaza of Light Station.

He expected his letter to be flashed in the viewing screen above the card slot (since there
was
a viewing screen). Instead, a larger slot at knee-level slowly extruded the black and gold edging of a space-mail enve—

lope. He pulled it out the last inch. (Inside, something
chunked]
reproachfully.) Across the gray flimsy, covering one corner of his identity number, large pink letters proclaimed: