Triton (Trouble on Triton) (34 page)

He pushed the door in. The room was perfectly in order. It’s waiting for someone to move in, he thought.

On the floor next to the wall sat his yellow plastic luggage sack, delivered by pneumatic tube from the spaceport.

On his desk, beside the reader, was a black—and gold-edged envelope—this one, presumably,
not
a facsimile.

“Here,” Bron said, opening a cupboard. Crouching down, he pawed through the slippers, boots, and shoes on the floor. That green pair that were too small for him ... ? No, he hadn’t returned them to his design rental house. “Put these on.”

“Socks?” Lawrence asked, wearily, sitting on one corner of the desk.

“In there.” Bron stood, pushed around the clothes hanging from the circular rack. “Look, put this cape on too. Out there, things
fall
on you, now. Wrap that around you and it’ll be some help.”

“Bright yellow?” Lawrence, holding the cape up by the hood, brushed through its folds with his other hand. “Lined with iridescent red and blue stripes ... naturally.”

“It may not be the highest style but it’ll do the job.”

Lawrence dropped the cloak over one arm and went back to snapping closed the shoes. The socks he’d slipped on were knee-length and lavender. “I always did think clothes were an obscenity.”

“On you, sweetheart, they look good.” Bron closed the cabinet. “Come on. Move!”

“Well—” Lawrence stood, pulling the cape around his shoulders and frowning down where it brushed the rug—“I suppose, in time of war ...” He pulled the hood up, frowned, then pushed it back again.

At the door, Bron said: “It
is
the war, isn’t it ... ?”

Lawrence’s wrinkled face wrinkled more. “That’s what the public channels have been saying for the last hour.” Lawrence pulled the cloak around him. “Now that I’m properly attired, just
where
do you propose to go?”

“Well, first let’s get out of here.” Bron went into the hall. The drive that had returned him had been thrown into reverse by the disaster of Alfred’s room.

“Where’s Sam?” Lawrence thought to ask, behind him. “Did the two of you come back together?”

“Just as far as the spaceport. Then he went off somewhere else.”

“How was your trip to Earth?”

Bron barked a single syllable of laughter. “Remind me to take a lot of cellusin and tell you about it someday. We got out just before war was officially declared.”

“Well, that’s something, I suppose,” Lawrence said, hurrying on behind. “The first two days you wouldn’t have known anything was different; then, suddenly, this!”

Downstairs, through the hall; and Bron stepped out of the orange light onto the dark balcony. Behind him, Lawrence said: “Oh,
dear
...!”

Bron looked back.

Lawrence, stooping in the doorway, turned over the gaming case. “I’ve had this for practically thirty years.’’ He closed it, pressed down the brass claws. The miniature shoutings of men, women, and children, like distant mumbles, ran down and, in a stutter of static, stopped. Lawrence fingered the cracked wood. “I wonder if it can be fixed?” He laid it against the wall and began to pick up pieces.

“Hey, come
on\”
Bron said.

“Just a moment. I want to put these aside so nobody will step on them.” Lawrence picked up the dice, the dice-cup. “When everything started, I ran up here, and as I got to the top, there was some sort of shock. I guess I must have dropped it.” He shook his head. “Thirty years. I was older than you are the first time I
saw
the game; but I feel like it’s been mine all my life.” He pushed a handful of figures to the wall beside the case. “Be careful when you go down the steps. Some of them may have rolled downstairs. They break easily.”

Bron said, impatiently: “Sure.” But the growing realization that, despite his desire to be somewhere else, he too had nowhere to go, made him wait for the old man.

“You don’t remember where the others were
supposed
to go?” he asked Lawrence, who was looking up between the buildings. Across the intersection rose a decorative arch, which, with all its light off, looked like two charred ribs from some incinerated carcass. There were a few stars.

“I wish they would turn on the sky again,” Lawrence said. “It’s not really agoraphobia—or ... what
would
you call it? Anauraphobia? Fear of losing one’s atmosphere? It’s just what with all the gravitational fol-de-rol it ... well, it would be nice to have it back.”

“I think we must have developed at least a couple of holes.” Bron squinted down the walkway, darker now than the unlicensed sector. “The wind got pretty rough for a while ... but it seems to have died down—is that fire along there?”

“If it is,” Lawrence said, “let’s go the other way.”

Bron started along the street, and Lawrence caught up a moment later.

“ Audri lives down here,” Bron said.

“Who’s Audri?” Lawrence asked.

“My boss—one of my bosses. The other is some credit-dripping bastard whose commune lounges in luxury out on the Ring.”

“If she lives down this way, I doubt she’s dripping much more credit than you are.”

“Oh,
she’s
not. Just him. She’s got three really unbearable kids and lives with a bunch of dykes in a gay co-op.”

“Oh,” Lawrence said. And then, three steps later: “Going through all this nonsense is bad enough on your own. I can
imagine
what it must be like with children!”

Bron grunted.

“The instructions that came through for evacuation were so garbled,” Lawrence said. “I wonder if they got theirs properly?”

Bron grunted again.

“If they had the same sort of interference around them that we had ... and with children!” Lawrence shrugged his cloak around him. “Oh, dear. That would be just terrible.”

Bron felt uncomfortable.

Lawrence was slowing down.

“Do you think we should go down and see if they’re still there and need a hand?”

Lawrence said: “The instructions came in
so
garbled ... I mean, Wang was the only person to figure out that we were supposed to evacuate in the first place.”

“There was an enforcement cordon around the area when I came in,” Bron said. “I had to break through it.”

Lawrence said: “With gravity going up and down at random all over the place, it’s pretty dangerous. I’m sure it’s safer out in the open than it is inside. On the other hand, if even the
tiniest
fragment of cornice fell on yow head at three hundred gravities, you might as well have the whole wall come down on top of you.”

“What’s a cornice?” Bron asked.

“To be sure,” Lawrence said. “The child doesn’t know what a cornice is. Which way does your boss live?”

“Right across the street from us, one unit over.”

“That should be over there,” Lawrence said. “What’s that—”

At which point there was an explosion somewhere to the left.

Bron pulled in his shoulders. “I don’t know—”

“Not that,” Lawrence said. “That—” which was a man, shouting, somewhere at the end of the block, in Audri’s direction.

Curious (and even more uncomfortable), Bron turned down the street: Lawrence, beside him, let his cloak swing open again.

They were on the same side of the street as Audri’s co-op.

The man—Bron could see him now—shouted again. In the voice Bron heard edges both of hysteria and rage. (Why, Bron wondered, am I walking down a street toward a strange, angry, and possibly crazy man, in the midst of a war. It’s neither a reasonable nor a happy situation.) But Lawrence hadn’t stopped, so Bron didn’t either.

He was a big man, in a maroon jumpsuit, with a slashed shoulder.

“Let me in!” he bawled. “Goddamn it, let me in! Or send
them
out!” His voice tore at things in his throat. “At least send the goddamn kids out if you’re too stupid to—” He staggered. “Will you send out my damned kids or I swear—!” He staggered again. “I swear I’ll tear the place down with my own hands, so help me Jesus!” He rubbed his stomach, bent unsteadily, then threw back his head. “You send them out here, or I swear I’ll come in there and—” Suddenly he rushed forward, up the steps, and pounded on the door (yes, it was Audri’s co-op) with both fists.

Bron had been about to whisper to Lawrence that they step into a doorway, to give them time to check this madman out, when the man—he was backing away from the door, his fists and his face raised—glanced at them, turned:

“Oh, Jesus Christ ...” He shook his head. His face was dirty and tear-stained. What shocked Bron was that the slash in the shoulder of his jump-suit was
not
something put there by a design house. The skin beneath it was badly scratched ... “Oh, for ... Jesus Christ! The goddamn bitches just don’t understand. They just don’t under—” He shook his head again, then turned back to the building and bellowed: “You just give me my goddamn children! I don’t care what you do with any of the others, but you just send
mine
out here! Now! I
mean
it! I—” From each cuff dangled a wire cage that apparently could swing up over his paint-flecked hands. Another cage (Bron realized he had seen him before, but couldn’t remember for the life of him where, which added to the discomfort) bobbed at the man’s shoulder. “The goddamn bitches just don’t understand about a—” He coughed violently, backed away, his wrist at his mouth, his eyes tearing—“a man and his children!” Again he turned to shout at the building, but the shout failed. Suddenly he turned, lurched off, reached the middle of the street, stopped, swayed, lurched on. He reached the head of an alley and started down it.

Bron and Lawrence frowned at each other, then looked again.

The craftsman was twenty feet along the alley when a lot happened, very fast: First, he went down on his knees, then fell flat over on his face, but not like an ordinary fall. It was as if he had been metal, and a magnet, suddenly turned on under him, had snapped him flat. Also, the entire right-hand wall of the alley, and some of the left, poured—or rather shot—down on top of him.

Bron squinted. His hair snapped at his head. Lawrence’s cloak whipped back, then forward about his legs, tugging the old man a few steps with it. Bron had to lean against the wind to keep from moving. After a second or so the dust, which till now had only made low, rounded waves, thick and fast as water, suddenly shot up, swirling, as if—but not “as if,” Bron realized: it
was
what had happened—it had become a hundred times as
light;
as light, again, as dust.

The alley was heaped with ten feet of debris.

Dust drifted.

Bron looked at Lawrence (who coughed), at Audri’s building, at the alley, at the building, at Lawrence. “I guess no one’s inside,” Bron said as the dust passed. Then, because that had sounded so inane, he said: “Maybe we better check, though.” He hoped Lawrence wouldn’t suggest checking in the alleyway too. Alfred had been bad enough; this could only be worse.

“Can we get around the side?” Lawrence asked, and obviously (and blessedly) meant the co-op. Between the co-op building and the building next to it, there was a narrow gate, which, when Bron reached through and lifted the hasp (“Now / never would have thought of that,” Lawrence said), swung open.

“Maybe we can find a window or something and get a look inside.” Bron’s skin tingled with memories of the alley he had just watched collapse. But Lawrence came in right after him, so,he had to keep going forward: there wasn’t room to squeeze back around him. He was wondering who would have a window facing out on a two-foot-wide alley when he came to one, with two, astonished faces in it—which were suddenly pushed aside by three more.

While heated conferral began among the women behind the glass, another woman pushed between them to look: and that was Audri, who grinned, nodded at him quickly, then turned away to join the conference.

Bron made come-out gestures.

They made helpless gestures back.

Bron made open-the-window gestures.

They made more helpless.

Someone carefully mimed something Bron thought must mean the front door was locked. Bron made stand-back motions, took off his sandal, then thought better and got Lawrence to give him one of the green shoes, and made to hurl it at the window. Some of the women inside looked distressed. Others laughed. They all stood back.

So Bron hurled it, heel first.

The
glass
shattered into an opaque web—that hung there. It was backed with plastic film so that he had to throw the shoe several times more, and than finally tear it away with his hand, nicking his fingers several places.

“Come on, you’ve got to get out!”

“What?”

“You’ve got to evacuate this area,” he shouted into the shadowed room full of women. “Audri? Hey, Audri, you have to get out of here.”

“I
told
you those were evacuation instructions,” one of the women was saying loudly to a group at the back of the room, “before the public channels went dead.”

“Audri, you better get your kids and—Audri?”

But she had left the room with several others.

Bron climbed through the window (a woman he hadn’t seen helped him down), while Lawrence went around to the front, and Bron more or less figured out from overlapping snippets that they hadn’t wanted to open the front door because of the man Bron and Lawrence had seen shouting. At which point a dozen children came into the room with several mothers, among them Audri (who was wearing a bright scarlet body-stocking with a lot of feathery things trailing from her head-band). “Hey!” He made his way to her side, took her shoulder. “You better get your kids together so we can
get
out of here—”

She blinked at him. “What do you think we’re doing? You said we had to evacuate, didn’t you?

Everyone will be down in a second.”

“Oh,” Bron said. “Oh, yeah. Sure.” More kids came in.

Two women were calling out instructions.

“Urn ...” Bron said. “Hey! They better all wear shoes. There’s lots of junk in the street.”

Three children dashed out of the room to get them.

A woman who seemed to be in charge turned to Bron. “It really was something, your coming to tell us.