Triton (Trouble on Triton) (39 page)

“Lawrence, please.”

Lawrence clucked out the door, ducked back. “As I said, I’ll be back in to talk to you again when you’ve slept it off.”

Which was about seven o’clock that evening. Bron woke up feeling like her insides would fall out if she stood up.

Fifteen minutes later, Lawrence came in, announcing: “We’re going to move you this evening. Now don’t complain. I’ll brook no protests. I’ve been running around all afternoon, and I’ve got a room for you in the women’s house of detention—forgive me, that’s my pet name for it—that’s Cheetah, the women’s co-op right behind us. Then I’m going to dip into my geriatric widow’s mite and take you out to a quiet, calm dinner, on my credit. Now don’t start putting up a fuss. I want you to know I have nursed three people through this operation before and you
all
say the craziest things under the anesthetic—though Lord knows, their reasons seemed a lot more sensible than yours. Really, it’s just like having a baby, only the baby—as one of my more articulate friends commented, when in your situation not twenty years ago—is you. You’ve got to get into walking and exercising as much as you can take as quickly as possible, or there’ll be hell to pay. Come on, up and at ’em. Lean on me if you want to.”

She didn’t want to.

But protest was as painful as compliance. And besides—she figured this out only when they were seated in a dining-booth (two other places they’d tried were closed: because of the war) behind a stained-glass partition in a restaurant Bron had never known was thirty yards from the Snake Pit’s door (but then, four-fifths of the patrons were Lawrence’s age or over, and nudity seemed to be
de rigeur)

—despite his age and predilections, after all, Lawrence
was
a man. And a real woman had to relinquish certain rights. Wasn’t that, she told herself silently, the one thing that, from her life before, she now, honestly knew?

Dinner was simple, unpretentious, and vegetarian. And, despite the soreness, with Lawrence’s gentle chatter it was pleasanter than any meal she’d had on Earth.

7. Tiresias Descending, Or Trouble On Triton

Coming across it thus again, in the light of what we had to do to render it acceptable, we see that our journey was, in its preconception, unnecessary, although its formal course, once we had set out upon it, was inevitable.

—G. Spencer Brown,
The Laws of Form

Her first minutes back at work, Bron was very nervous. She had considered the all-black outfit. But no, that would only be delaying things. The previous afternoon, she and Lawrence had gone to Lawrence’s(I) design-rental house and spent an amusing two hours during which Lawrence had had the house make up (among other things) a pair of his-and-hers breast bangles, glittering crimson with dozens of tiny mirrors on wriggly antennae. “Lawrence,” she had protested, “I’m just not the type to wear anything like this!” Lawrence had countered: “But I am, dear. At least in the privacy of my own room. They’re cunning!” She had taken hers home and put them in the cupboard as a memento of the day. Save the short gray shoulder cloak, she had rented no new clothing with her new image in mind. Bron wore the cloak to work.

She had been in her office about an hour when Audri came by to prop herself, with one elbow, on the doorjamb. “Hey, Bron, could you ...” Audri stopped, frowned. “Bron ... ?”

“Yes?” She looked up nervously.

Audri began to grin. “You
are
kidding me—?”

“About what?”

Audri laughed. “And it looks good, too! Hey—” She came in—“what I wanted to get was that information about Day Star minus.” She stepped around the corner of the desk, put a folder down. “Oh, did you see that memo from the Art Department—?” which Bron finally found on the floor beside her desk. Some sculptor had arrived in the cafeteria that morning with a pile of large, thin, polished, metal plates, demanding to build a sculpture, floor to ceiling, then and there. The Art Department had sent around its memo, which included an incomprehensible statement by the artist, explaining how the plates would be moved within the sculptural space on small motors, according
to
an arcane series of mystical numbers. The whole was intended as some sort of war memorial. And could you please let us have a
yes

or
no
response before ten-thirty, as the artist wished to have the work completed by lunch.

“I suppose I’m feeling positively disposed to change today,” Bron told Audri, and sent the Art Department a
yes
on the console—though she had always felt a mild distrust of mystical art. Back at the desk, with Audri, she ran over more logical/topological specifications.

At the door, about to leave, Audri halted, looked back, grinned again, and said: “Congratulations, I guess,” winked and departed, bumping her shoulder on the jamb.

Bron smiled, relieved. But then, she’d always liked Audri.

Lunch?

She debated whether or not to go, right up to the minute. Staying away, of course, would only be putting things off. Just then, the console began to chatter and flash.

Another Art Department memo:

As the sculpture had been completed, three artists from a rival school, masked in turquoise but otherwise
nude had rushed into
the cafeteria and, with flamers, destroyed the work, charring and
y

melting the plates. The memo contained a statement from the marauders even more incomprehensible than the artist’s had been. (Basically, they seemed to be attacking the first artist’s math.) The sculptor, who was eighty-two, had suffered a psychotic episode (the memo went on) and been hospitalized, where she might well remain for several years, it appeared, from the initial diagnosis. Chances for her eventual return to art, however, were hopeful. The remains of the work would be on view through lunch, after which it would be removed to the hegemony’s museum, over the cafeteria, where it would stay on permanent exhibit. The memo closed with a flurry of apologies and was signed (typically) by Iseult, with a parenthetical note saying that Tristan dissented from the proposed suggestion and if enough alternates were put forward before closing, there would be a vote among them tomorrow.

An area of the cafeteria floor, blackened and strewn with burnt metal, was roped off. Every minute, one of the Seven Aged Sisters, in beaded green and silver, would leave her (or his) position by the cafeteria door, and come to walk, slowly, around the blistered enclosure (Bron stepped back from the taped rope to let the Sister pass), pausing every seventh step to make sacred and purifying signs, then, on completing his (or her) circuit, exchange serious words and nod dolefully with one or more of the spectators.
(Just
like the cafeteria of that Lux, Protyyn-recycling plant, Bron reflected Absolutely
no
difference at all!) Some of the statue’s motors, still working fitfully, now and then flapped a coruscated stub of aluminum around, twenty feet along the frame (which shook and clanked and tottered from floor to ceiling), while, somewhere else among the struts still standing, another metal plate tried to tug away from some twisted shape to which it had fused, the whole, charred horror attesting, perhaps more than the silvery creation intended, to the dark and terrible import of art.

Bron backed away, trying to envision the undamaged work, while others moved in to take her place at the rope. She had already decided that this lunch the meal would be a carnivorous one, and so was angling to tfce left, away from the vegetarian counter, when somebody put a hand on her shoulder. She turned.

“Beautiful!” Philip exclaimed, a grin splitting his beard’s knap. “Audri told me, but of course I wouldn’t believe it till I saw—” Philip made a gesture with the backs of both hirsute hands toward Bron’s breasts. “Gorgeous .... ! This is permanent, now?”

“Yes,” Bron said, wishing they were not in the middle of the floor.

“Here,” Philip said. “Let’s get out of the middle of the floor,” and put his hand on Bron’s shoulder again, which Bron wished he wouldn’t do, to guide her over to the booths. But then Philip was touch-ish with all the female employees, Bron had noted before, sometimes with envy, sometimes with annoyance. (He was touch-ish with the male employees too, which, before, had just been annoying.) “And this ... um, goes all the way down?” Philip asked.

Bron did not quite sigh. “That’s right.”

“Just marvelous.” Philip dropped his hand but craned around to stare. “I can’t get over those tits! I’m green with jealousy!” He covered his slightly loose pectoral with spread fingers. (Philip had come in naked today.) “I have to make do with one; and then it’s just up and down like a leaky balloon. Bron, I want you to know I’m
really
impressed. I think you’ve probably found yourself. Finally. I think you just may have. It’s got that feeling about it, you know—”

Bron was about to say,
Shove it, Philip, will you?
when Audri said:

“Hey, there. Is Philip ragging you? Why don’t you lay off Bron, and let her get her lunch, huh?”

“Yeah,” Philip said. ‘“Sure. Get your lunch. We’re sitting right over there.” He gestured at a booth somewhere beyond the blackened disaster. “See you when you get back.”

As she moved through the line, Bron remembered her thought with Lawrence:
A11 men have some
rights,
and considered it against her annoyance with Philip. Philip was certainly closer to the type of man she’d set herself to be interested in than, say, Lawrence. What, she wondered, would Philip be like in bed? The blus-teriness would transform to firmness. The honesty would become consideration. Philip (she considered, with distaste) would never think of lying on top of someone lighter than he was without invitation. And he would have some particularly minor kink (like really getting off on licking your ear) which he’d expect you to cooperate with and be just annoyingly obliging about cooperating with any of yours. In short, what she knew from the information left over from that other life: Philip was as sexually sure of himself as Bron had been. She had recognized it before. She recognized it now. And Philip was still (with his hand on the shoulder and his unstoppable frankness) the most annoying person she knew—plurality female configuration or not, she thought grimly. It was not that she felt no attraction; but she could certainly understand how, with men like Philip around, you could get to not
like
the feeling.

“Excuse me ... ?” someone said.

She said: “Oh, I’m so ...” and took her tray and started around the cafeteria. She saw their booth, went toward it.

As she neared, she was sure she heard Philip say:

“... still doesn’t like to be touched,” and thought, as she took her place across from him, I
didn’t
hear the pronoun, but if I had and it was ‘he,’ I’d kill him. But the conversation was on Day Star and how the war seemed to have improved the personalities of two of the representatives, and what had happened to the third? No, he wasn’t a war casualty, that much had been established. (And wasn’t Lux just terrifying?

Five million people!) One of the junior programmers said morosely: “I used to
live
in Lux,” which, even for a u-l’er, was incredibly gross. About the table, people’s eyes caught one another’s, then dropped to their trays, till someone picked up the conversation’s thread: But he
had
disappeared ... In the midst of these speculations, Philip leaned his elbows on the table and asked: “Say, where’re you living now?”

Bron told him the name of the women’s co-op.

“Mmm,” Philip said, and nodded. “I was just thinking, back when I was married—my second marriage, actually—my second wife was a transexual ... ?”

“When were
you
married?” asked the junior programmer, who wore a silver body-stocking from head to toe, with large black circles all over, and sat wedged in by the wall. “You’re not an earthie. They don’t even do that too much on Mars, now.”

The programmer, Bron realized. She was probably
from
Mars.

“Oh, I used to spend quite a bit of time in your u-1; you can make any kind of contract you want there:
that’s
why we’ve got it ... But that was back when I was a very dumb, and very idealistic kid. Like I was saying, my wife had started out as a man—”

“How’d she stack up to old Bron here?” the programmer asked.

“I pretend to be crude,” Philip said, leaning forward and speaking around Audri, “but
you
really are!

She was great—” He settled back. “The marriage, however, was three or four times as bad as absolutely any sociologist I’d ever read on the subject said it would be, back when I was a student at Lux. And you know, I still had to do it two more times before I learned my lesson? But I was young then—that was my religious phase. Anyway; after we broke up and she left the mixed co-op where we were living, she moved into a straight, women’s co-op for a while—I mean, she was about as heterosexual as you can get, which may have been part of the problem, but nevertheless: then she moved into another women’s co-op that was nonspecific. I remember she said she thought it was a lot nicer—I mean, as far as she was concerned. They were a lot more accepting of general, nonsexual eccentricities and things like that, you know? It was a place called the Eagle, if I remember. It’s still going. If you have any problems with your place, you might bear it in mind.”

“I will,” Bron said.

The next day another memo came down from the Art Department. It seemed that, independently, twenty-seven people had come up with the suggestion that the memorial, in its new version, be titled
The
Horrors of War
and so displayed in the hegemony museum. This suggestion had been duly passed on to the sculptor, in the hospital, who was apparently in touch enough to make the following reply:
“No\ Nol
Flatly and bluntly
No\
Title too banal for words! Sorry, art just does
not
work that way! (If you
must

name it something, name it after the last head of your whole, ugly operation!) It is my job to
make
works that you may get anything out of you wish. It is
not
my job to
teach
you how to make them! Leave me alone. You have done enough to me already.” And so
Tristan and Iseult: A War Memorial
was transferred upstairs, where from time to time Bron, on her way to the office library, stopped in to see it among the other dozens of works on exhibit. The burned and broken bits were all in a large carton near one base, where they gazed up at her like ashy skulls in which you could not quite find the eyes. Bron kept the memo in her drawer. She cut the words of the old sculptor out of the flimsy to take home and hang on her wall. They had struck some chord; it was the first thing in her new life that seemed to indicate that there might be something to live for in the world besides being reasonable or happy. (Not that it was art—any more than it was religion!) And two weeks later, with Lawrence carrying the smaller packages, Bron moved from the straight Cheetah into the unspecified Eagle.