Triton (Trouble on Triton) (42 page)

“They used to think the male sex hormones made your muscles stronger, didn’t they?”

“Testosterone makes the membrane of the muscle cell less permeable,” Brian said, “which means, given two muscles, developed to equal strength, the one without testosterone clogging it up, so to speak, can function at peak efficiency marginally longer because it can diffuse fatigue products out through the cell wall marginally faster.”

Bron sighed. “It’s so strange, the way we picture the past in a place full of injustice, inequity, disease, and confusion, yet still, somehow, things were ... simpler. Sometimes I wish we
did
live in the past. Sometimes I wish men were all strong and women were all weak, even if you did it by not picking them up and cuddling them enough when they were babies, or not giving them strong female figures to identify with psychologically and socially; because, somehow, it would be simpler that way just to justify ...” But she could not say what it would justify. Also, she could
not
remember ever thinking those thoughts before, even as a child. She wondered why she said she had. Thinking it now, it seemed bizarre, uncomfortable, unnatural.

“You know,” Brian said suddenly, “the only reason we can even have this conversation is because we’re both Martians—and not even Martian roaring girls with cutaway veils and silver eyelids, but Martian ladies at that! Anyone out here listening to this would think we were out of our minds, the both of us.” Her eyelids (which
were
silver! ... but it was just paint) had lowered, projecting faint anger in that typically Martian way. “I know it’s the height of rudeness, but really, talking to you always makes me remember how glad I am I left Mars. I’m going to be blunt.” Brian cocked her head. “I said before, you were a woman made
by
a man. You are also a woman made
for
a man. Just considering who
you
are, I suspect you’d be a lot happier if you got a man. After all, you’re an attractive and intelligent woman, with a normal woman’s urges. There’s certainly nothing
wrong
with having a man; in your own quiet way, you act as though there were.”

The knees of Bron’s slacks were pressed together, She slid her hands over them and felt very vulnerable before the older and wiser Brian. “Only ...” she said at last, “the man I want wouldn’t be very happy with me if I came looking for him.”

“Well, then,” Brian said, “you might consider
making
do with what’s available until perfection comes along.”

A month later (it took her that long to decide), Bron felt like a perfect fool asking Prynn to suggest a place to go. The possibility, however, of being recognized in the places she herself had visited before, from month to month, made her uncomfortable. After all, the Spike—someone practically a perfect stranger—had recognized her just standing on a transport platform. Not that she’d gone to such places so often that anyone would recognize her had she been male. Nevertheless ... And of course Prynn couldn’t simply suggest a few names and let it go. No, Prynn had to spend the next week “... asking around ...” Bron tried to picture the requests: “Hey, I know this kinky sex-change, see, who’s about ready to—” I am too old, Bron decided, to be embarrassed: which basically meant forgetting about it, thinking of other things.

One of the things she thought about was why she had not told Brian about meeting the Spike. But it was only a counseling hour, not some tell-all, hon-esty-or-nothing, archaic-style therapy session. And hadn’t Lawrence once said (How
was
Lawrence, she wondered; he had not been over to see her forever) the only way to deal with a woman like the Spike was to treat her as if she didn’t exist? And anyway, Brian’s suggestion (slightly modified: Bron would
not
make do; but she might put herself in the
way
of what she wanted) would answer there as well. If she was tempted to fling over everything just like that, it might be a bit more reasonable to make sure that the next person who asked her to was at least the proper sex.

Prynn opened the door without knocking and said: “Okay, I’ve figured out where I’m going to take you.” Then she looked up at the ceiling, made a very unpleasant sound (supposed to express the ultimate in so—

phisticated boredom), and fell back against the wall. The cabinet door joggled.

“Now what’s the matter?” Bron pushed back the reader (but let her hand stay on the skimmer knob). A strip of light from the edge of the case lay across her wrist. “You know, you really don’t have to go with me. I’d understand: you’re into older men. I doubt whether there’ll be too many at the sort of place you’d take me—”

“My social worker,” Prynn said, “says that
anything,
to the exclusion of everything else, is a perversion. So, once every six weeks, I go do something different. Just to prove I’m normal. This place is just swarming with twenty-year-old and thirty-year-old and forty-year-old men. I’ll feel like a damn child molester. But you’ll love it. Come on,
get
your clothes on. I swear, you take longer to get dressed than any five people I’ve ever known put together.”

“You get out of here,” Bron said. “I’ll see you down in the commons.”

The place they arrived at was pleasantly plasticky (which meant there was no attempt to make the plastic look like either stone, ice or wood), with a decent-enough-looking clientele, who, Bron decided, probably liked to get things settled early. (The places Bron had used back when she had been living at the men’s co-op tended to be places where people drank long and lingered late.) It was a collection of reasonably happy men and women—

“This is the active side of the bar, i.e., if you want to check out the beauties languishing on
that
side, without being bothered,” Prynn explained. “That side if you want to be approached by someone who’s made up their mind from
this
side. And that there is free-range territory. Nobody’s really hard and fast about any of the rules here—which is why I come. But I’m just telling you what it says in the monthly newsletter.”

—happily reasonable men and women, Bron thought, as Prynn stalked off. Take any five of them . •

. But she did not want to look too hard at any—

one. Not just yet. There, a man in a skirt of brown/green/orange cloth; there a woman’s naked hip, another’s fur-mantled shoulder. And there,
in a hint at
coming styles, Bron saw, on someone’s back moving off among those gathered at the bar, a green plastic Y snapped to blue suspenders ... But she would
not
focus on any individual, which made it all giddily adventurous—though she was familiar enough with such places from another world, another time, another life. She started to move around toward the other side of the bar to wait for someone to approach her—and experienced the oddest reaction.

If someone had asked her, then, what is was, she would have answered, astonished, “Terror!” Ten seconds into the feeling, however, and she realized it was more subtle than that. It was more like an insistent annoyance, signaling from some place edging consciousness that something extremely dangerous was near. Then, it resolved: She was here to
be
approached. But she was not here to
invite
approach. Certainly, she could not linger on the active side of the bar where she was now. That was just
not
the sort of woman she was interested in being taken for. If the man she was looking for
were
here (Any five

... ? She thought, irrelevantly. Now she dared not look anywhere except the baseboard on the counter, between the legs of the people standing beside it, six feet away) even being seen on this side would spoil everything. She turned, heading for free-range, passing Prynn, who, elbows on the bar, had eyes only for the older of the two women working behind the counter—certainly the oldest person in the place, probably in Lawrence’s league. (And probably, Bron thought, a sharer of Lawrence’s tastes.) As Bron reached the free area, she thought: What they need here, of course, is
three
counters: One for the ones who want to approach; and then one for the people who want to be approached; then one for the people who wouldn’t
mind
being approached—but no, that wasn’t the answer. There wasn’t any difference between not-minding-it, and wanting-it-but-just-wanting it-a-little-less. Well, then: four ... ? With a vision of an infinite regression of counters, each with fewer and fewer people at it, until she, herself and alone, stood at the last, Bron took her place at the center of free-range, where, indeed, a plurality of the reasonable and happy women and men in the place had gathered. She moved as close to the bar as she could get, looking, she knew, like a woman who wasn’t interested in anything sexual at all. And in a place like this (she knew), that probably meant she would get no advances at all because there were too many people there who were. Oh, there’d be a few who, tired of the chase, might just want to engage in some—

“Yeah,” a pleasant-looking youngster standing next to her said, leaning his elbows on the bar. “There really are times when it’s
just
like that.” He cocked his head, smiled, nodded. Bron said: “There are a hundred and fifty other people in here you could approach who would be more interested in it than I am, Now
get
lost. And if you don’t, I’ll kick you in the balls. And I
mean
it!”

The youngster frowned, then said: “Hey,
sorry
... f” and turned away, while somebody else wedged into his place. And Bron thought, a little hysterically: I am in the position where I am here to be approached and cannot acknowledge an approach of any sort: otherwise, I will turn off the person I am here to be approached by. That’s ridiculous! she thought, shaking her head for the third time to the younger of the two women bartenders, who’d just asked her again what she wanted to drink. What in the world does
that
get you? In another time, on another world (or, indeed, in another bar, with the rules carefully spelled out in the monthly newsletter), raped. And
that
wasn’t the answer either, because once on Mars (it had been the night after his nineteenth birthday) he had
been
raped, by a gang of five women with hard, metallic eyelids as banal as the lyrics to all the thousand (orphan-) Annie-shows that had spawned them, hell raising through the dawn-dim alleys of the Goebels and enraged by the symbol above his right eye; and though, for a few months, he had actually fantasized sexually about the one of the five who hadn’t (actually) taken part and (for the first few minutes) tried to stop the others, he’d known even then that was just a strategy for salvaging
something
from a thoroughly unpleasant experience that had left him with a sprained thigh, a dislocated shoulder, and a punctured eardrum which (in another world, at another time) might have made him deaf in one ear for life. Remembering, she ran a foreknuckle
along
her
gold brow—completely meaningless on a woman, of course; but out here no one would know. No one would care.

I simply shouldn’t be here, Bron thought. The fear that it was somehow the sex itself she was afraid of was what, she realized, had held her here this long. (And that, she suddenly realized, was pushing an hour!) But it was
everything
else that circled the sex, that kept it closed, locking it in, and—was this something to be thankful for?—somehow pure.

Bron took her hands from the counter, stepped back, turned—

He stood at the “active” side of the bar, among the men and women there, just turning from a conversation, his face settling, from its laughter, into the familiar dignity, the familiar strength. (Had she dreamed about it ... yes!) His eyes swept the room—passing hers, but her belly tightened when they did—to the even more boisterous “passive” bar.

Go, she thought. Go!

Really, it
was
time to leave! But he was there, like all she could ever remember imagining, as new as now and familiar as desire. She watched, numbing, knowing she had known him laughing among his hard-drinking friends, dark brows a-furrow in concentration over a problem whose solution might roll worlds from their orbits, carelessly asleep on a bed they had shared for the night, his eyes meeting hers in an expression that encompassed all the indifference of now but backed by the compassion of the unspeakably strong, the ineffably wise, and the knowledge of half a year’s companionship. She pushed from the bar, started toward him, thinking: /
mustn’t! I
—and shouldered quickly between two people, her throat drying with the fear that, while she was turning to excuse herself here, beg a pardon there, he might leave. She
couldn’t
do this! This was all hopelessly and terribly wrong. But she was pushing between the last two, now, reaching to touch his naked shoulder. He turned, frowned at her.

Bron whispered: “Hello, Sam ...” and then (by dint of what, she didn’t know) felt a smile quiver about her own mouth. “Need any new wives in your commune, Sam ... Or am I sallow enough ... ?”

For a moment Sam’s full mouth compressed into a great, black prune, the expression almost shock, or pain. Then his eyes left her face to drop down her body; and came slowly back, with a smile that was almost mocking. “Bron ... ?”

Let there be something beside derision in his smile, she whispered silently; her eyes closed lightly before it. “Sam, I ... I shouldn’t be here ... I mean on this side of the ... I mean ...” Bron blinked. Sam’s hands came down on her shoulders, like black epaulets (in the half-light, Sam’s skin really was black, with a dim bronze highlight under his jaw, a dark amber one coiling his ear), and she had the wild vision she had somehow just risen in rank (thinking: And not a single soldier ...) and thinking at the same time: And it
still
isn’t sex! I know what sex is too well to fool myself into thinking that. Sam was saying: “Hey, there!” And, “Well!” and then: “I admit, I’m ...” Then just nodded, with ap-proval(!) and with (still) the smile. “How’ve you been, huh? The Old Pirate mentioned you’d suddenly decided to cross the great divide. You keeping well?”

And because she suddenly felt her heart would crack the cage of her ribs, shatter her joints gone brittle at hip, knee, and elbow, she lay her head against his neck, held on to him. Had he been a column of black metal one degree below white-heat, he would not have been harder to grasp.