The leather collar he’d had his design-rental house put together, with brass buckle and studs—which was just nostalgia for last year’s fashions. The irregular, colored web for his chest was an attempt at something original enough to preserve dignity, but not too far from this year’s.
He was putting his card back into his purse when something clinked: his two-franq token had fallen into the return cup, reiterating what the booth itself had been placed there to proclaim: The government cared.
He forefingered up the token (with the machine broken, he would not know if the two franqs had or had not been charged against his labor credit till he got to his co-op computer) and fisted aside the curtain. He thought:
I haven’t really looked at my final person. I—
The Plaza of Light was, of course, now almost deserted. Only a dozen people, over the concourse, wandered toward this or that side street. Really, there was just no crowd to pick a final person from.
Bron Helstrom frowned somewhere behind his face. Unhappily, he walked to the corner, trying to repicture the colored dots fading into his syrup-edged reflection.
The sensory shield (“It merely shields us from the reality of night;” again, Lawrence) flowed overhead, translating into visible light the radio-sky behind it.
Neptune (as was explained on various tourist posters frequently and, infrequently, in various flimsies and fiche-journals) would not be that intense a turquoise, even on the translation scale; but it was a nice color to have so much of up there.
Night?
Neriad? From Triton, the other moon of Neptune never looked larger than a star. Once he’d read, in a book with old, bright pictures, “... Neriad has a practically sausage-shaped orbit ...” He knew the small moon’s hugely oblate circuit, but had frequently wondered just what a sausage was.
He smiled at the pink pavement. (The frown still hung inside, worrying at muscles which had already set their expression for the crowd; there was no crowd ...) At the corner, he turned toward the unlicensed sector.
It was not the direct way home; but, from time to time, since it was another thing his sort didn’t do, he would wander a few blocks out of his way to amble home through the u-1.
^ At founding, each Outer Satellite city had set aside a city sector where no law officially held—since, as the Mars sociologist who first advocated it had pointed out, most cities develop, of necessity, such a neighborhood anyway. These sectors fulfilled a complex range of functions in the cities’ psychological, political, and economic ecology. Problems a few conservative, Earth-bound thinkers feared must come, didn’t: the interface between official law and official lawlessness produced some remarkably stable unofficial laws throughout the no-law sector. Minor criminals were not likely to retreat there: enforcement agents could enter the u-1 sector as could anyone else; and in the u-1 there were no legal curbs on apprehension methods, use of weapons, or technological battery. Those major criminals whose crimes—through the contractual freedom of the place—existed mainly on paper found it convenient, while there, to keep life on the streets fairly safe and minor crimes at a minimum. Today it was something of a truism: “Most places in the unlicensed sector are statistically safer than the rest of the city.” To which the truistic response was: “But not all.’9
Still, there was a definite and different feel to the u-1 streets. Those who chose to live there—and many did—did so because, presumably, they liked that feel.
And those who chose only to walk? (Bron saw the arched underpass in the gray wall across the alley’s end.)—those who chose to walk there only occasionally, when they felt their identity threatened by the redundant formality of the orderly, licensed world ... ? Lawrence was probably right: They were a type too.
The wall right of the arch was blank and high. In their frame, green numbers and letters for the alley’s coordinates glowed. Forty or fifty stories up, windows scattered irregularly. Level with him, someone had painted a slogan; someone else had painted it out. Still, the out-painting followed the letters enough to see it must have been seven ... eight ... ten words long: and the seventh was, probably, earth.
The wall to the left was scaly with war posters. “Triton with the Satellite Alliance!” was the most frequent, fragmented injunction. Three, pretty much unmarred, demanded: “What on EARTH have WE got to worry about!?!” And another: “Keep Triton Up and Out!” That one should be peeled down pretty soon, by whoever concerned themselves with poster peeling; as, from the scraps and shreds a-dangle, somebody must.
The underpass was lit either side with cadaverous green light-strips. Bron entered. Those afraid of the u-1 gave their claustrophobic fear of violence here (since statistics said you just wouldn’t find it inside) as their excuse.
His reflection shimmered, greenly, along the tiles.
Asphalt ground, grittily, under his sandals.
An air convection suddenly stung his eyes and tossed paper bits (shreds from more posters) back along the passage.
A-squint in the dying breeze, he came out in near darkness. The sensory shield was masked here, in this oldest sector of the city. Braces of lights on high posts made the black ceiling blacker still. Snaking tracks converged in gleaming clutches near a lightpost base, then wormed into shadow.
A truck chunkered, a hundred yards away. Three people, shoulder to shoulder, crossed an overpass. Bron turned along the plated walkway. A few cinders scattered near the rail. He thought: Here anything may happen; and the only thing my apprehensiveness assures is that very little will ...
The footsteps behind only punctured his hearing when a second set, heavier and duller, joined them.
He glanced back—because you were supposed to be more suspicious in the u-1.
A woman in dark slacks and boots, with gold nails and eyes and a short cape that did not cover her breasts, was hurrying after him. Perhaps twenty feet away, she waved at him, hurried faster—
Behind her, lumbering up into the circle of light from the walkway lamp, was a gorilla of a man.
He was filthy.
He was naked, except for fur strips bound around one muscular arm and one stocky thigh; chains swung from his neck before a furry, sunken chest. His hair was too fouled and matted to tell if it was dyed blue or green.
The woman was only six feet off when the man—she hadn’t realized he was behind her ... ?—overtook her, spun her back by the shoulder and socked her in the jaw. She clutched her face, staggered into the rail and, mostly to avoid the next blow that glanced off her ear, pitched to her knees, catching herself on her hands.
A-straddle her, the man bellowed, “You leave him—” jabbing at Bron with three, thick fingers, each with a black, metal ring—“alone, you hear? You just leave him alone, sister! Okay, brother—” which apparently meant Bron, though the man didn’t really look away from the top of the woman’s blonde head—“she won’t bother you any more.”
Bron said: “But she wasn’t—”
The matted hair swung. His face glowered: the flesh high and to the left of his nose was so scarred, swollen, and dirty, Bron could not tell if the sunken spot glistening within was an eye or open wound. The head shook slowly. “Okay, brother. I did my part. You’re on your own, now ...” Suddenly the man turned and lumbered away, bare feet thudding through the circle of light on the cindery plates.
The woman sat back on the walkway, rubbing her chin.
Bron thought: Sexual encounters are more frequent in the u-1. (Was the man part of some crazed, puritan sect?)
The woman scowled at Bron; then her eyes, scrunching tighter, moved away.
Bron asked: “I’m terribly sorry—but are you into prostitution?”
She looked at him again, sharply, started to say one thing, changed to another, finally settled on, “Oh, Jesus Christ,” then went back to fingering her jaw.
Bron thought: The Christians aren’t making another comeback ... ? He asked: “Well, are you all right?”
She shook her head in a way that did not, h
e decided, mean specifically negation. (As her exclamation, he decided, did not specifically mean Christianity.) She stuck out a hand.
He looked at it a moment (it was a hand wide as his own, with pronounced ligaments, the skin around the gold nails rough as some craftsman’s): she wanted help up.
He tugged her to her feet, noting as she came, unsteadily, erect that she was generally big-boned and rather awkward. Most people with frames like that—like himself—tended to cultivate large muscles (as he had done); she, however—common in people from the low-gravity Holds or the median-gravity Keeps—hadn’t bothered.
She laughed.
He looked up from her hips to find her looking at him, still laughing. Something inside pulled back; she was laughing at him. But not like the craftsman at the mumblers. It was rather as if he had just told her a joke that had given her great pleasure. Wondering what it was, he asked:
“Does it hurt?”
She said, thickly, “Yes,” and nodded, and kept laughing.
“I mean I thought you might be into prostitution,” Bron said. “Rare as it is out here—” which meant the Outer Satellites—“it is more common here—” which meant, die u-1. He wondered if she understood the distinction.
Her laugh ended with a sigh. “No. I’m into history, actually.” She blinked.
He thought: She disapproves of my question. And: I wish she would laugh again. And then: What did I do to make her stop laughing?
She asked: “Are you into prostitution?”
“Oh, not at ...” He frowned. “Well, I guess—but do you mean buying or ... selling?”
“Are you into either one?”
“Me? Oh, I ...” He laughed now. “Well, actually, years ago, you see, I was—when I was just a teenager ... um, selling—” Then he blurted: “But that was in Bellona. I grew up on Mars and ...” His laugh became an embarrassed frown; “I’m into metalogics now—” I’m acting like I live here (which meant the u-1), he thought with distress; it was trying not to have it appear he lived outside. But why should he care about—? He asked: “But why should you care about—?”
“Metalogics,” she said, saving him. “Are you reading Ashima Slade?” who was the Lux University mathematician/philosopher who, some twenty-five years ago, had first published (at some ridiculous age like nineteen) two very thick volumes outlining the mathematical foundations of the subject.
Bron laughed. “No. I’m afraid that’s a little over my head.” Once in the office library, he had actually browsed in the second volume of Summa Metalogiae (volume one was out on loan); the notation was differ—
ent and more complicated (and clumsy) than that in use now; it was filled with dense and vaguely poetic meditations on life and language; also some of it was just wrong. “I’m in the purely practical end of the business.”
“Oh,” she said. “I see.”
“I’m not into the history of things, really.” He wondered where she’d heard of Ashima Slade, who was pretty esoteric, anyway. “I try to keep to the here and now. Were you ever into—”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just making polite noise.” And while he wondered why she disapproved, she laughed again: “For a confused person, you’re very straightforward.”
He thought: I’m not confused. He said: “I like straightforwardness when I find it.”
They smiled at each other. (She thinks she’s not confused at all ...) And enjoyed her smile anyway.
“What are you doing here?” Her new tone suggested she enjoyed it too. “You don’t live in here with us mavericks ... ?”
“Just taking a shortcut home.” (Her raised eyebrow questioned.) “What were you doing? I mean, what was he doing ... ?”
“Oh—” She made a face and shook her head. “That’s their idea of excitement. Or morality. Or something.”
“Who’s ‘they?’”
“The Rampant Order of Dumb Beasts. Another neo-Thomist sect.”
“Oh?”
“They sprang up about six weeks back. If they keep sprung for another, I may move back into your side of town. Well, I suppose—” She shrugged—“they have their point.” She swiveled her jaw from side to side, touched it with her fingertips.
“What are they into?”
“Putting an end to meaningless communication. Or is it meaningful ... ? I can never remember. Most of them used to belong to a really strict, self-mortification and mutilation sect—you saw that eye? They disbanded when some of the shamans managed to do them—
selves in by particularly lingering and unpleasant means. They’d completely given up on verbal communication; and two of the leading-lady gurus—as well as one of the gentlemen—had their brains publicly burned out. It was pretty grim.”
“Yes,” he said, on the verge of giving a small, sympathetic shudder. But she didn’t. So he didn’t.
“Apparently, some of the former members who survived—they didn’t even allow themselves a name, back then; just a number: a very long, random one, I believe—have gotten together again around more or less similar principles, but with a, I guess you could call it, more relaxed interpretation: The Order of Dumb Beasts ...” She shook her head. “The fact that they do talk, you see, is supposed to be a very subtle sort of irony. It’s the first time they’ve bothered me. They are a nuisance—next time, I just may nuisance back!”
“I can imagine,” he said, searching for some point in the unpleasantness to take the conversation on. He found none and floundered, silently. She saved him again with: “Come walk with me,” and smiled, beckoning with her head.
Smiling back, he ducked his in relief; and came. Seconds later, she turned (on a turning he had often seen and never thought about), then glanced back at him again.
He said: “Have you noticed? To meet a new person here in Tethys is always like entering a new city ... ?” He’d said that before, too.
In the narrow way, gray walls either side (under the black ceiling), she glanced at him, considering.
“At least, it’s always been that way with me. A new friend, and they invariably have an appointment or another friend on some street you’ve never been on before. It makes the city—come alive.”
Her new smile mocked slightly. “I would have thought to someone like you all places in the city looked alive,” and she turned down an even narrower alley.
He glanced at the glowing, red (for the u-1) numbers of the street’s coordinates up on the wall, follow—
ing. Then the thought, But why am I following? overtook him. To dispel it, he overtook her.
The young man Bron had hardly noticed leave the archway ahead suddenly turned his back to them, crouched, then leaped, flinging his arms, and his hair, up and over; feet—red socks flashed between frayed cuffs and fringed shoes—swung through air and over, after hands: coppery hair swept the ground. Then he was right side up. Then another back-flip. Then another. Then he bounced, whirling, arms out for a brief bow. Shirtless, in tattered pants, panting a little, with hair hanging over his shoulders, straggling across his face, he (a lot cleaner than the gorilla Bron had just rescued her from) grinned.
And she, again, was smiling: “Oh, come on! Let’s follow fom!”
“Well, if you—” He still wondered why he was following her.
But she grasped his hand! He thought of it with the exclamation. And thought, too, That’s the first thing that’s happened today that deserves one! And that thought (he thought) was the second ... !—which began an infinite regress of pleasure, only interrupted as she took his wrist now and pulled him around a corner: In the small square, a refuse can blazed, flaking light over the dark-haired girl’s guitar; she turned, strumming slowly. The music (the acrobat preceding them did a final flip and, staggering and laughing, stood) quickened.
Some man started singing.
Bron looked for him and saw the poster—mural rather—across the back wall:
A winged beast with near-naked rider rose through thrashing branches, the rider’s expression ec
static, flexed arms bound in bronze. Reins of chain hung slack on the left, pulled taut on the right, with the mount turned against them.
Someone had set up a hand-lamp, with a swivel beacon, on the gravel; it put a bright pool over the rider’s jackknifed thigh. The beast’s scales were tight where the creature’s neck turned out, and wrinkled where one of its legs bent.
A dozen people stood near the fire. One woman, seated on a crate, suckled a baby: in the warm draft from the burning can, her chiffon lifted and fell.
Bron saw the rope from the overhead black ... swaying. He could only follow it up some thirty odd feet; which meant it could have been tied to a support hidden in darkness thirty-one feet above them, or, indeed, one up three hundred. (From the swing’s frequency, it was more like thirty-five.) Someone was sliding, slowly, down: gold chains hung from her toe-rings. At the end of each, small mirrors spun in the firelight (fire dots sped over the mural); the rope slipped and slid, around her calf, around her waist, around her overhead arm as, descending into the glow, she watched the company. When she halted—was she the model for the rider? Those bronze gauntlets, that leathern skirt ... ?—the highest head was some two feet below the lowest mirror.
Some of the people were swaying to the unseen singer’s song.
He’d just caught the last half-dozen words, when: “Look ... !” he whispered, pulling the woman to him. “Isn’t that the man who punched ... ?”
His companion frowned toward where he’d nodded (her shoulders moved beneath her short, gray cape), then looked back at Bron (shoulders settling) and whispered: “Look again, when she sways into the firelight ...”
He’d dismissed the “she” as a slip of the tongue, when the muscular creature with the fur-bound thigh and arm, matted hair and ulcerated eye, swaying among the dozen others swaying, shifted weight: Bron saw, across the hirsute pectorals, scars from what must have been an incredibly clumsy mastectomy. Someone in front stepped aside so that a wavering edged shadow fell away: obviously from the same bestial sect, however naked and grubby, this was & woman—or a castrate with chest scars. Neither had been the case with the gorilla assailant.
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