Triton (Trouble on Triton) (7 page)

“At which point you said you couldn’t stand political homosexuals. Lawrence, what
is
the point?”

“And I
still
can’t. The point is merely—” Lawrence returned his eyes to the board: in the Mountains of Norhia a situation had been developing for some time that Bron had hoped would turn to his advantage, if Lawrence would only keep the transparent screens of Egoth and Dartor out of it: the Mountains of Norhia were where Lawrence was looking—“that my feelings toward you, later that night as I lay awake in alcoholic overstimulation, tossing and turning in my narrow bed where you had so cavalierly dumped me and left, were rather like you have been avoiding describing your feelings toward that woman.”

“I thought you passed out—” Bron’s eyes went from the board to Lawrence’s. “Pardon me?”

“I said, right after you so considerately put me to bed—I mean I suppose you could have left me lying on the hall floor; passed out? Ha!—I felt about
you
rather like you feel about
her.
I hated you, I thought you were hardhearted, insensitive, ungenerous and pignoli-brained; and quite the most beautiful, dashing, mysterious, and marvelous creature I’d ever laid eyes on.”

“Just because you wanted to ... ?” Bron frowned. “Are you suggesting that / want to—... with her?”

“I am simply noting a similarity of reactions. I would not presume to suggest
any
of my reactions might be used as a valid model for yours—though I’m sure they can.”

Bron’s frown dropped to the micro-mountains, the miniscule trees, the shore where tiny waves lapped the bright, barbaric sands. After seconds, he said: “She gave me one of the most marvelous experiences of my life. At first I only thought she’d lead me to it. Then suddenly I found out she’d conceived, created, produced, and directed ... She took my hand, you see. She took my hand and led me—”

Lawrence sighed. “And when you put your arm around my feeble, palsied shoulders—”

Bron looked up again, still frowning. “If we all
had
died this evening, Lawrence, I wouldn’t have died the same person as I was if I’d died this morning.”

“Which is what your initial comments about the whole thing seemed to suggest—before you began to intimate how cold, inhuman, heartless, and untrustworthy this sweet creature obviously was. I was only trying to remind you.” Lawrence sighed again. “And I suppose I did, at least that night, love you in spite—”

Bron’s frown became a scowl. “Hey, come on—”

Lawrence’s wrinkled face (below the horseshoe of white furze surrounding the freckled pate) grew mockingly wry. “Wouldn’t you know. Here I am, in another passionately platonic affair with an essential louse.”

Seeing
her,
Bron said: “Lawrence, look, I do think of you as my friend. Really. But ...” Lawrence’s face came back, wryness still there. “But look, I’m not seventeen. I’m thirty-seven. I told you before, I did my experimenting when I was a kid—a good deal of it, too. And I’m content to stick by the results.”

The experiments’ results, confirming him one with eighty percent of the population, according to those

“quaint” statistics, was that he could function well enough with either sex; but only by brute, intellectualized fantasy could he make sex with men part of his actual life. The last brutal in-tellectualizing he’d done of any sort was his attendance at the Temple of the Poor Children of the Avestal Light and Changing Secret Name; brutality was just not what he was into. “I like you. I want to stay your friend. But, Lawrence, I’m
not
a kid and I’ve been here before.”

“Not only are you a louse. You are a presumptuous louse. I am not thirty-seven. I am over seventy-three. I too have been here before. Probably more times than you have.” Lawrence bent over and contemplated the board again, while Bron contemplated (again) the phenomenon by which, between some time he thought of as
then
(which contained his experiments with both sex and religion) and the time he thought of as
now
(which contained ... well, all this), old people had metamorphosed from creatures three or four times his age to creatures who were only two up or less. Lawrence said: “I do believe it’s your move. And don’t worry, I intend to stay your friend.”

“What do you think I should do, Lawrence?”

“Whatever you think you should do. You might try playing the game—hello, Sam!” who had come up to the table. “Say, why don’t you two play together against me. Bron’s gone quite mushy over some theatrical woman in the u-1 and can’t get up nerve to go back and find her, which is fine by me. But it’s shot his concentration all to hell, which isn’t. Come on, Sam. Sit down and give him a hand.”

On the point of spluttering protest, Bron made room on the couch for the jovial, brilliant, powerful—should he just get up and
leave?
But Sam asked something about his meld strategy and, when Bron explained, gave a complimentary whistle. At least Bron
thought
it was complimentary. They played. Tides turned. So did the score. By the time they adjourned for the evening (elementary players, Lawrence had explained, shouldn’t even hope to play a game to completion for the first six months), Bron and Sam were pounding each other’s shoulders and laughing and congratulating themselves and turning to congratulate Lawrence and, of course, they would all
get
together tomorrow evening and take up where they’d left off.

As Bron walked down the corridor toward his room, he decided warmly that the trouncing he had given the old pirate, even if it had taken Sam’s help to do it, had made the evening worth it. At his door, he stopped, frowned toward the door opposite.

He hadn’t even asked Sam how Alfred was. Should he knock now and find out? A sudden memory of one of the few things like a personal conversation he’d ever had with Alfred returned: once Alfred had actually taken Bron to a restaurant (recommended by Flossie, who had had it recommended to him by a friend of Freddie’s) which turned out to cater almost entirely to well-heeled (and rather somber) nine—to thirteen-year-olds. (The younger ones were simply swathed in fur!) Only a handful of adolescents even near Alfred’s age were present, and they all seemed to be overlooking the place with patent good will and palpable nostalgia. Bron was the single adult there. During dinner Bron had been rambling on about something or other when Alfred leaned across the table and hissed, “But I don’t
want
relationships! I don’t
want
friendships! I want sex—sometimes.
That’s
what I’m doing at Serpent’s House. Now get off my back!” Two sexually unidentifiable children, hands locked protectively around their after-dinner coffee bulbs, turned away small, bald, brown faces to muffle smiles in their luxuriant collars. Yet he still considered Alfred his friend, because Alfred, like all his others, had come to him, still came to him, asking that he do this, or could he lend him that, or would he mail this coupon to that advertiser, or this letter of protest about what some other had sent him, pick up this or that on the way home, or where should he throw that out and, yeah, sure you can have it if you
want
it. With varying amounts of belligerence, Bron complied to these requests (to keep peace,
he told
himself at first), only to discover that, in his compliance, he valued the relationship—friendship, he corrected himself (because he
was
thirty-seven, not seventeen). I suppose, Bron thought, standing in the hall, I understand him, which has something to do with it. I certainly understand him better than I understand Lawrence. Or Sam. (Or that woman ... ?

Again her face returned to him, turning in delightful laughter.) He turned to his door. As far as knocking on Alfred’s? If Alfred wasn’t all right, Bron understood him enough to know that he wouldn’t want to be caught at it. And if he was, he wouldn’t want to be disturbed in it. (If he’s all right, Bron thought, he’s probably sleeping. That’s what I’d do with my all-right time if I had as little of it as that poor kid.) Bron pushed open his own door and stepped into a dimly lighted room, with an oval bed (that could expand to hold three: despite Alfred’s secretiveness, there was nothing in the co-op house rules that said you couldn’t ball as many people as you liked as long as you did it in your own room), a reader, a microfiche file drawer, a television screen and two dials below it for the seventy-six public channels and his three private ones, two windows (one real, which looked out on the alley behind the building, the other a changeable, holographic diarama: blue curtains were drawn across both), clothes drawers, sink drawers, and toilet drawers in the wall, plastic collars here and there on the blue rug from which, at the push of a switch in the control drawer, inflatable chairs would balloon. It was a room like Alfred’s room, like Lawrence’s, like Sam’s, indeed like some dozen others he had lived in on one world and three moons; a comforting room; a room like ten thousand times ten thousand others.

At four twenty-seven in the morning, Bron woke suddenly, wondering why. After five minutes in the dark, an idea occurred—though he was not sure if it was the idea that had startled him from sleep. He got up, went out into the hall, and down to the console room.

Left over on the screen, from the last person to use it, were two lists. (Usually it was something from Freddie’s, or Flossie’s, home-study course.) Absently

Bron ran his eye down the one on the right: after half a dozen entries, he realized he was reading down names of former Presidents of Mars. His eye caught at Brian Sanders, the second of Mars’s two (out of twenty-four male) women presidents. It was under Brian Sanders, the old firebrand and roaring-girl, that, fifty years ago, male prostitution had been made legal in Bellona; also, ran the story, she had single-handedly driven the term “man-made” from most languages of Earth (where her speeches had of course been televised) and Mars, by insistantly referring to all objects of war, as well as most creations of Earth culture, as “boy-made.”

The list on the left (male and female names mixed equally and at random) was—it was obvious just from the groupings into seven—names of the various governing boards of the Outer Satellite Federation. Yes, the last group were the ones in power now, during the War Alliance: their names were all over the public channels. (Male and female names out here, of course, didn’t mean too much. Anyone might have just about any name—like Freddie and Flossie—especially among second, third, and fourth generation citizens.) Bron wondered what political bet or argument the information had been summoned up to resolve; and, without even sitting, cleared the current program. A medical program was still set underneath it—but it wasn’t Alfred’s.

Bron punched out General Information.

He was expecting ten minutes of cross-reference and general General Info run-around when he dialed “The Spike: actress (occupation)”—how
would
you file information on someone like that? The screen flickered for a second, then blinked out:

“The Spike—working name of Gene Trimbell, producer, director, playwright, actress, general manager of a shifting personnel theatrical commune, which see. Confirm? : : biographical : : critical : : descriptive : :
public record9’

Bron frowned. He certainly wasn’t interested in her biography. He pressed Biography anyway.

“Biography withheld on request.”

That made him smile.

He knew what she looked like:

“Description” wasn’t necessary.

He pressed Critical and the screen filled with print: “The Spike is the working name of Gene Trimbell, by common concensus the most striking of the young playwright/director/producers to emerge at the beginning of the current decade, many of whom were associated with the Circle (which see) at Lux on Iapetus. She attracted early attention with her stunning productions of such classics as
Britannicus, The
Great God Brown, Vatzlav,
and
A.C./D.C,
as well as a one-woman videotape production of
Les
Paravents,
in which she took all ninety-eight roles. While still in her early twenties, she directed the now legendary (and still controversial) twenty-nine-hour opera cycle by George Otuola,
Eridani
(which see), that involved coordinating over three hundred actors, dancers, singers, two eagles, a camel, and the hundred-foot, flaming geyser of the title role. If her directorial work in traditional forms has tended toward the ambitious and monumental, her own creative pieces are characterized by great compression and brevity. She is, today, most widely known for her work in micro-theater, for which she formed her own fluid company three years ago. Frequently, her brief, elliptical, and intense works have been compared to the music of the twentieth-century composer Webern. Elsewhere, another critic has said:

‘Her works do not so much begin and end; rather, they suddenly push familiar objects, emotions, and actions, for often as little as a minute or less, into dazzling, surreal luminescence, by means of a consortment of music, movement, speech, lights, drugs, dance, and decor.’ Her articles on the theater (collected under the title
Primal Scenes
and represented as a series of exhaustive readings of the now famous epigraph from Lacan which heads each piece: The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no
mise en scene
would be possible. Let us say that the action would remain, properly speaking, invisible from the pit—aside from the fact that the dialogue would be expressly and by dramatic necessity devoid of whatever meaning it might have for an audience:—in other words, nothing of the drama could be grasped, neither seen nor heard, without, dare we say, the
twilighting
which the narration in each scene casts on the point of view that one of the actors had while performing it?’), have given many people the impression that she is a
very cerebral
worker; yet the emotional power of her own work is what the most recent leg of her reputation stands on. Even so, many young actors and playwrights (most of whom have, admittedly, never seen, or seen little of, her work) have taken the
Scenes
as something of a manifesto, and her influence on the current and living art of drama has been compared with that of Maria Irene Fornes, Antonin Artaud, Malina, or Col-ton. Despite this, her company remains small, her performances intimate—though seldom confined in a formal theatrical space. Her pieces have been performed throughout the Satellites, dazzling many a passer-by who, a moment before, did not even know of their existence.”