Triton (Trouble on Triton) (8 page)

The index down the side of the screen listed a double-dozen more critical pieces. He read a random three and, in the middle of a fourth, switched the console off.

He pulled the door of the room to behind him—it wouldn’t close all the way. Frowning, he turned to examine it. The lintel across the top had strained a millimeter or so from the wall. The evening’s gravity

‘wobble’? He looked at the console through the door’s now permanent crack. How could you ask General Information about
ihaft

Barefoot, he padded up the hall, suddenly tired.

Climbing naked into bed, he thought: Artists ... ? Well, not quite so bad as craftsmen. Especially when they were successful. Still ... of course he
would
go and fixate on someone practically famous; though, in spite of Lawrence,
he’d
never heard of her. Depressed, and wondering if he’d ever see her again, he fell asleep.

3. Avoiding Kangaroos

Philosophers who favor propositions have said that propositions are needed because truth is intelligible only of propositions, not of sentences. An unsympathetic answer is that we can explain the truth of sentences to the propositionalist in his own terms: sentences are true whose meanings are true propositions. Any failure of intelligibility here is already his own fault.

—Willard Van Orman Quine,
Philosophy of Logic

Audri, the boss he did like, put a hand on each of the cubicle’s doorjambs and, standing at all sorts of Audri-like angles, said (with an expression he didn’t like at all): “This is Miriamne—Bron,
do
something with her,” then left.

The young woman, who, a moment back, had been behind her (Miriamne?) was dark, frizzy-haired, intelligent looking, and sullen.

“Hi.” Bron smiled and thought: I’ll have an affair with her. It came, patly, comfortably, definitively—a great release: That should get the crazed, blonde creature with the rough, gold-nailed hands (and the smooth, slow laugh) off his mind. He’d drifted to sleep thinking about her; he’d woken up thinking about her. He’d even contemplated (but decided, finally, no) walking to work through the u-1. Miriamne, in the doorway, was wearing the same short cape in dove-gray the Spike had worn, was bare-breasted, as the Spike had been, and, more to the point, immediately recalled a job-form he had filled out seventeen years ago: “Describe the preferred, physical type you feel most assured of your performance with.” His preferred description had been, patly: “Short, dark, small-boned, big-hipped.”

And Miriamne, short, dark, small-boned, and just a hair’s breadth shy of cal-lipygous, was looking somewhere about five inches to the left, and two inches above, his right ear. At his eyebrow? No ...

Bron rose from his chair, still smiling. She was the sort of woman he could be infinitely patient with in bed (if she needed patience), as it is often rather easier to be patient with those with whom you feel secure in your performance: he experienced a pleasant return of professional aplomb. Hopefully, he thought, she lives in a nice, friendly, mixed co-op so she doesn’t lack for conversation (conversation in sexualizationships was not his strong point). Women who accepted this he had occasionally grown quite fond of. And there was something in her expression that assured him he could never, really, care. How much better could it be? Rewarding for the body, challenging to the intellect, and no strain on the emotions. He came around, sat on the corner of his desk—interposing himself between her and whatever she was now staring at behind him—and asked: “Have you any idea what exactly they expect me to do
with
you?” Two weeks, he decided, at minimum—at least it’ll occupy my mind. It might even run three or four months—at maximum. Who knows, they might even eventaUy like each other. She said, “Put me to work, I suppose,” and frowned off at the memos shingling the bulletin board. He asked: “What exactly
are
you into?”

She sighed, “Cybralogs,” in a way (she was still looking at the board) that suggested she’d said it many times that morning.

Still, he smiled and, a flicker of bewilderment playing through his voice, asked: “Cybralogs ... ?” and, when she still didn’t look, asked also: “If your field is Cybralogs, why in the world did they send you to Metalogics?”

“I suspect—” Her glance caught his—“because they have five letters in common, three of them even in the same order. As all those war posters are constantly reminding us, we aren’t
in
the world. We’re on the last major moon of the Solar System, the only one that’s managed to stay out of the stupidest and most expensive war in history—
just
managed. And after last night, one wonders how long
that’ll
be for!

Our economic outlets and inlets are so strained we’ve been leaning on the border of economic crisis for a year—and from the wrong side at that. Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep: Have you known anything to function as it should in the past six months?

Anything?
I mean, after last
night
—”

Oh, he thought, she lives in the u-1. Well, that shouldn’t be a problem; might even make things more interesting ... And blinked away blonde laughter from the dove-gray shoulders.

“Yes, that business yesterday evening. That was pretty scary, wasn’t it? A guy at the co-op I’m staying at is in the Intelligence Liaison Department. Afterward, he was trying to explain the whole thing away to a bunch of us. I don’t think anyone was convinced.” (That should show her he had some political consciousness. And now something for her ego ... ?) “Really, I know Audri has to use whoever she gets, especially right through here, but what’s the point of sending someone with your training to this department?” He twisted around on the desk corner, picked up the arc of wire from the corn-rack, put the red bead to his ear and the blue one to his lips. “Personnel ... ?” he said too gruffly; Miriamne glanced at him. “This is Bron Helstrom—” followed with the first ten of his twenty-two-digit identification number; for job purposes that was all anyone needed. “Get that down, please. I don’t want to have to repeat it. You’ve sent us along, here in Metalogics, one Miriamne—I’m not going to ask her
her
number:
you
look it up. She’s been bothered enough today already.” He glanced at Miriamne, who
was
looking at him now, if a bit blankly. “She’s a cybralogician and for some, bird-brained reason neither of us understands or appreciates, she’s been sent to—”

“Whom do you wish to speak to in Personnel?” the voice answered with understandable testiness.

“You will do.” (Miriamne could only hear his side of the conversation.) “This whole nonsense has grown up because responsibilities have been shuttled and shunted around for I’m sure a week or more. And I—that is, Bron Helstrom, in Metalogics—” Once more he rattled off his number: “... I’ll assume you have that now, so that you know where this complaint is coming from—I
don’t
intend to get lost in the shuffle. You’ve sent this woman into Metalogics, a department that can make full use of neither her training nor her talent. This is not the first time this has happened; it’s the sixth. That is ridiculous, a waste of everybody’s time, an interruption in everyone’s work. Now
you
decide who ought to know, and
you
go tell them—” He heard the sharply drawn-in breath, then the click of the connection broken—“and if anyone wants to know where the complaints came from—now, get it this time:” Once more he gave his name and number to the dead, red bead. “Now, think about that, pignoli-brain, before you make the next person’s life miserable by sending them to do a job they aren’t trained for. Good-bye.” He hung up, thinking: The “pignoli-brain” was for cutting him off. Still, he decided, he’d gotten his point across. He looked at Miriamne (with the ghost of belligerence playing through his smile): “Well, I guess we’ve made our point—for what little it’ll do.” He cocked his head.

The same ghost played through hers. She rubbed her neck with one finger. Her nails were short and chrome-colored. Her lips were full and brown. “I’m a cybralogist,” she said. “As far as I know, there’s no such thing as a cybralogician.”

Bron laughed. “Oh. Well, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve never even heard of a ‘cybralog.’”

“I’ve
heard
of metalogics ... ?”

While Bron laughed, inside the ghost momentarily became real. “Look,” he said. “I can either tell you about metalogics and, by tomorrow, we can probably have you doing something that isn’t too dull, if not useful.” He turned his hands up. “Or we can have some coffee and just ...” He shrugged—“talk about other things. I mean I know how exhausting these hurry-up-and-wait mornings can be. I had to go through my share before ending up here.”

Her smile became a short (but with that sullen ghost still playing through) laugh. “Why don’t we have the coffee and you can tell me about metalogics.”

Bron nodded. “Fine. I’ll just get—” getting up.

“May I sit in this—?”

“Sure. Make yourself comfortable. How do you take your—?”

“Black,” she said from the sling chair, “as my old lady,” and laughed again (while he reached into the drawer at his knee and dialed. One plastic bulb, sliding out, hit his knuckles and burned). “That’s what my father always used to say.” She put her hands on her knees. “My mother was from Earth—Kenya, actually; and I’ve been trying to live it down ever since.”

Bron smiled back, put one coffee bulb on the desk, reached down for the other and thought: Typical u-1 ... always talking about where they come from, where their families started. His own parents had been large, blond, diligent, and (after years of working as computer operators on Mars, when their training on Earth, outmoded almost before their Martian emigration, had promised them glorious careers in design) fairly sullen. They were in their midforties when he’d come along, a final child of five. (He was pretty sure he was a final child.) Was that, he wondered again, why he liked sullen-looking women? His parents had been, like so many others it was embarrassing, laborers in a new world that needed such labor less and less. He had not lived with them since he was fifteen, had not seen them since he was twenty, thought about them (usually when someone was talking about theirs) seldom, talked about them (in concession to a code of politeness almost universal outside the u-1 that, once he had realized it existed, he’d found immensely reassuring) never.

Bron handed Miriamne the second bulb. “All right. Metalogics ...” Back behind the desk? No, better prop himself on the front again, for effect. “People—” He settled back on crumpling flimsies—“when they go about solving any real problem, don’t use strict, formal logic, but some form of metalogic, for which the rules of formal logic can be considered—on off Thursdays—the generating parameters. You know the old one: If a hen-and-a-half lays an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half ... ?” He raised an eyebrow (the real one) and waited for her to sip:

Her plastic bulb wrinkled in miniscule collapse. She looked up.

“The question is: Then how many eggs does
one
hen lay in
one
day?”

“One?” she suggested.

“—is the quote logical unquote answer people have been giving off the top of their heads for over a hundred years. A little thought, however, will show you it’s really two-thirds of an egg—”

Miriamne frowned. “Cybralogs are speech/thought representation components—I’m a hardware engineer: I don’t know too much about logic, meta or otherwise. So go slow.”

“If a hen-and-a-half lays an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half, then
three
hens would lay
three
eggs in the
same
day-and-a-half, right? Therefore
one
hen would lay
one
egg in that day and a half. Therefore one hen lays—”

“Two thirds of an
tgg
—” She nodded, sipped. The bubble collapsed more—“in one day.”

“We
got
into metalogic,” Bron explained (thinking: With the sullen, intelligent ones, that look of attention means we’re getting further than we would if they were smiling), “when we ask why we called

‘one’ a ‘logical’ answer in the first place. You know the beginning tenet of practically every formal logic text ever written, ‘To deny P is true is to affirm P is false’?”

“I vaguely remember something about denying the Taj Mahal is white—” Miriamne’s bubble was all wrinkled plastic between bright nails—“is to affirm that it’s not white ... an idea that, just intuitively, I’ve never felt very comfortable with.”

“You have good reason.” Bron sipped his own and heard the plastic crackle. “The significance of

‘white,’

like the significance of any other word, is a
range
of possibilities. Like the color itself, the significance fades quite imperceptibly on one side through gray toward black, and on another through pink toward red, and so on, all the way around, toward every other color; and even toward some things that aren’t colors at all. What the logician who says ‘To deny the Taj Mahal is white is to affirm that it is not white’ is really saying is: 7/ I put a boundary around part of the range of significance space whose center we all agree to call white, and // we then proceed to call everything within this artificial boundary “white” and everything outside this boundary “not white” (in the sense of “nonwhite”—now notice we’ve already introduced a distortion of what we said was really there), then any point in the total range of significance space must either be inside or outside this boundary—already a risky idea; because if this boundary is anything in the real universe, from a stone wall to a single wave pulse, there has to be something underneath it, so to speak, that’s neither on one side nor the other. And it’s also risky because if the Taj Mahal happens to be made of white tiles held to brown granite by tan grotte, there is nothing to prevent you from affirming that the Taj Mahal is white and the Taj Mahal is brown and the Taj Mahal is tan, and claiming both tan and brown to lie in the area of significance space we’ve marked as ‘nonwhite’—”

“Wait a second:
Part
of the Taj Mahal is white, and
part
of the Taj Mahal is brown, and
part
of the Taj Mahal is—”