“Okay.” Bron nodded, smiled, and felt put upon.
Alfred had emigrated from some minor moon (Uranus’s—but then, which of Uranus’s weren’t minor; not one of the five was over 900 k’s in diameter) as a fourteen-year-old orphan; and didn’t like to talk about his past, either. (Even this much information had come to Bron via Lawrence.) Bron figured that emigrating at fourteen took about ten year’s more guts than emigrating at twenty-four, even if it was within the Satellite Federation. Hell, three years ago the situation had been so tense only Ganymede and Triton were accepting emigrants from Earth and Mars both. Triton only took them from Mars. “Alfred, has it ever occurred to you that you might be gay?” He asked because he felt he had to say something. “I mean, emotionally.” (Alfred, having gotten his favor, would sit silent the next hour if given his head.) Also, bits of the Spike’s conversation kept returning to him. “What I’d do if I had problems like that is check out a refixation clinic. Get your thing switched over to men and see if it all falls into place.”
“No,” Alfred said, shaking his head. “No____” But both the no’s and the headshake were despair rather than negation. “No ... I mean, I did that, once, you know? I mean that’s what my social worker said, too. They fixed it up for me. At a clinic in the u-1. For six months I tried it.”
“And?”
“It was awful. I mean I was horny for men all right. But as far as how it went when I got ’em in the sack, I mean it was just the same thing—up, down, in, out, and, ‘What, you’re finished already?’—only with complications—I mean, if they go in and you finish up in three seconds, then it hurts, you know? So you gotta ask them to take it out, and they still wanna go, and nobody likes that!”
“Mmmmm,” Bron said, because he couldn’t think of anything else.
“Finally, I just went back to the clinic and said, hey, please, would you put it back together the way it was before? Let me at least like what I like liking—you know?—whether I mess up or not. I mean—” Alfred sat back—“they’re supposed to be very common prob—
lems. It’s not like they were rare or anything.” Alfred frowned. “I mean it’s not like I’m the only person who ever had problems like that—you’d think they could do something for a guy.” He sat back a bit more. “Did you ever have problems like that?”
“Well ...” Bron considered. Two of his first three (major) sexual experiences (all within the month before his fourteenth birthday) might, with definition stretched, have been said to have involved premature orgasm, i.e., the orgasms had surprised him. But not since. What problems he now had (if they were problems) veered in the other direction: and even those merely tended to herald a recurrent (and blessedly mild) prostate infection that had popped up every year or so since he was thirty. “If you’re making it every other night,” Bron offered, “you can’t expect it to go perfect every time.” During his first professional years, when, at two, three, and often four a day, he had actually balled (the first time he’d calculated it, the number had taken him aback, too) eight hundred or more women, he’d been attacked by the ‘limps’ somewhat under a dozen times; since then, the frequency had gone substantially down. The only way he could conceive of Alfred’s problems was to assume that it was tantamount to being, basically, asexual. He was sure Alfred enjoyed roaming in the many meeting places with their loud music, their low lights, enjoyed being eyed by women, being engaged in conversation by them (or perhaps Alfred did the engaging. Bron knew he tended to project his most common experiences—rather than his preferences—on everybody), even enjoyed bringing them back to his eccentric address (“An all male co-op ... ? And you mean it isn’t gay?”). Perhaps Alfred even enjoyed ordering out-of-stock ointments at tiny shops. Sex, however (Bron was convinced), Alfred could not possibly enjoy. “Give it some time,” Bron said. “And, well ... I mean, when I was your age ...” But Alfred was seventeen. And Bron was a politic enough thirty-seven to know no seventeen-year-old (especially a seventeen-year-old who had elected to live so completely away from his peers as Alfred) wanted to be reminded of it.
So, politicly, he let it hang. “You know, last night, after the shield went off and you had your nosebleed, I almost knocked on your door to say hello, but I figured you—”
“I wish you had,” Alfred said. “Oh, man, I wish you had! I was all alone, no girl with me, no nothing—and suddenly I thought I was gonna die and my ears nearly popped and my nose started bleeding and I could hear things falling over in the other rooms—they cut the damn gravity!” Alfred took a breath. “They got me back together, you know—that big nigger who’s always tellin’ everybody what to do and why? But I couldn’t go to sleep for the rest of the night. I wish somebody had come in to see me. I really do.” Alfred’s green eyes came back to Bron’s. “You gonna pick up that ointment for me, huh?” They held all the old suspicion, the old mistrust. “Okay ... Good.” Then Alfred stood, turned (where the black suspenders crossed between his pimply shoulder blades, there was a red plastic Q. Bron thought: Q?) and walked away.
Understanding? Only slightly guilty, Bron asked himself: Where is it? And got no answer. I call it friendship, but it’s simpler than that. He uses me and I let him. Lord knows I’d prefer to spend any hour in either Lawrence’s or the big nigger’s company. Still ... is it just a bond between two, hung-up heterosexual males? He’s hung up in performance (and the hang-ups he has with it honestly make less sense to me than the propensities of a Lawrence, a Miriamne!)—And what am / hung up in ... ?
At any rate, Bron wished either Sam or Lawrence would come down into the commons room, with or without vlet.
For work next morning he wore clothes.
Lots of them.
All black.
He finished going through the Day Star-minus folder, closed it, put it back in the bottom drawer, and decided it would just have to wait for another week before he could bother writing up a coherency validation.
He was looking over a diptych of multiple-state evaluation programs which, for the life of him, he could not figure out in which of three directions the modular context was supposed to function, when Miriamne rapped on the jamb of the open door. “May I talk to you a minute?”
Bron sat back, pulled his cloak around him. “Certainly.”
She stopped, just inside the doorway, looking uncomfortable, looked at the bulletin board, looked at the desk corner. “Audri told me you’d asked for me to be transferred to another department.”
With a black-gloved forefinger, Bron pushed the mask higher on his nose; it had slipped a bit, which was fine for reading but not for talking t» i people standing up when you were sitting down. As he put his gloved palms on the gray graphpapen shingling his desk, it slipped again; which meant he would have to conduct this interview—he felt the clutch of embarrassment high in his chest (or low in his throat) and swallowed at it—with her head cut off by his eye-hole’s upper edge, muzzily, at the nose. “That’s right. After a little thought, I just decided it was silly, with your training—cybralogs, or whatever—to waste your time and ... well, my time too.”
“Mmmm,” she said. “And there I thought I was catching on pretty fast for someone who didn’t know her way around at all.”
“Oh,” he said, “really, that isn’t the point—”
“I’m afraid what the point is, is that I’m out of a job.”
“Mmmm?” he asked, not sure what she meant. “Well, you mustn’t worry. They’ll find you a place eventually—it may take another day or two. But chances are it’ll be closer to your field.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been through five departments already. I’ve been transferred in each case. The Personnel receptionist told me, somewhat icily, this morning—that they—whoever ‘they’ are—just didn’t have work for me in my own field and that since they’ve tried me in three related fields and—in two others where my aptitudes were high—one of those was this one—they would simply have to class me as unemployable.”
“Oh, w
ell, now—that is a little silly. I mean, in a company like this, with someone like you—But then, the whole last couple of months have seen a lot of confusion slipping by—” He brought his boots together beneath the desk, parted his gloves a little more. “Why did the other departments transfer you?”
“They had their reasons.” She looked at the desk corner, the other desk corner, at his face.
Bron lowered his head (which completely cut off hers), raised his gloved fingers, meshed them, put his chin on his clothed-over knuckles—the dark veiling along the mask’s bottom pulled back against his lips—“Well, I have my reasons too.”
She said, “Mmmm,” again, in a different tone; and had laid one brown finger on the edge of the office console and was sort of pivoting her hand around on its chrome nail—a nervousness he found incredibly annoying.
I had to transfer her, he thought. (His own hands, nervously, were back on the desk.) I couldn’t possibly expect to work in the same eight-by-eight space all day with someone who, from major proclivities to minor ticks, make me, however irrationally, that uncomfortable.
She said: “I was just wondering if it had anything to do with that nonsense yesterday.”
Bron raised a questioning eyebrow. But of course she couldn’t see it behind the full-head mask. “How do you mean?”
“Well, all day long you were leaving your hands around on various desks and tabletops with your fingers in the age-old socially acceptable position—rather like now ...”
He looked down. “Oh ...” He closed his hands on the graphpaper; that was one of the unfortunate habits that was left over from his youthful profession; sometimes he signaled without even knowing it.
“—and I wasn’t being too responsive. I just thought you’d pick up on it Half the time, I thought you actually had. But then, we didn’t get it really straightened out till we were halfway home. And T made that crack to the Spike—she told me she’d told you, when I got back, all terribly apologetic. I guess theater people aren’t really known for their discretion.” Her hand dropped to her side. “What I said was pretty much joking.”
He laughed, leaned forward. The tunic pulled uncomfortably across his back. Cape folds, falling, whispered to the floor.
“And so was I. I hope you didn’t take any of that seriously—I didn’t.”
Her smile was worried. “Well ... I just thought I’d ask.”
“I’m glad you did. I’d feel terrible if you left thinking it was because of a silly remark like that. Really, I may—what was it?—be ‘... a louse who’s trying ...’ but, honestly, I’m not a monster. If it makes you feel better, I’d decided to ask for your transfer before any of that even happened.” He felt sorry for her, suddenly, through the annoyance of embarrassment. “Look, be honest with yourself. There I was, pawing all over you yesterday—T mean, I didn’t realize you weren’t interested. But that’s just the type I am. I find you very attractive. You certainly couldn’t have been looking forward to working with me all that much, with my carrying on like that—”
“You don’t mean,” she said, and even without her face he could tell she was frowning, “that you had me transferred because I wasn’t interested in you sexually ... ? I’ll be honest. That hadn’t even occurred to me!”
“Oh, no ... !” Inside the mask, he felt his face grow moist. “I just meant that you probably wouldn’t—You don’t really think that, do you? Because if you do, you’re just wrong! You’re very wrong!”
“Until Audri stopped me in the hall this morning, all I was thinking was that you’d made Metalogics sound like a fairly interesting subject. And I was rather looking forward to working in the department.”
“Well, thank you—” Without straining preposterously back, he could not see above her dark, delicate collarbone. “I’m glad at least I—”
“What it comes down to is: Is there any chance you might change your mind and keep me on?”
A surge of embarrassment and annoyance closed out all sympathy. He took his gloved hands from the desk and put them on his thighs, let them drop from his thighs, so that the voluminous double sleeves fell down about his wrists. Should he? Could he let her intimidate him like this? “No.” He took a breath, let it out. “I’m afraid I can’t.” He raised his head high enough to see her chin: it was moving a little oddly. “You can’t run a department that way. I’m sorry about the job, but—well, anything I say would just be silly at this point. My reasons have to do with a lot of things, which, since you aren’t in this department now, aren’t your concern. We have the Day Star program to rework where, yes, I could possibly use you. But I’ve just finished going over it again not ten minutes ago, and for all sorts of reasons, having to do with equally important projects, I just don’t want to do it now. It’s very simple and very straightforward: I just don’t need you, right now, for the jobs I have to do.” He took another breath and felt, to his surprise, somewhat relieved by his explanation. “Actually, I’m glad you came to see me. Because I wouldn’t have wanted you to leave thinking it was something personal.” Hoping he would never again have to set eyes on her, even so much of her as he could see now, he said: “Maybe we’ll run into one another at your co-op; someday we may even be able to have a drink and a laugh over it.”
“You said I should be honest,” came from somewhere above her shoulders. “Frankly, I hope I don’t see you or anyone else from this lame-brained funhouse for a good, long time. And that, I’m afraid, is completely personal!”
Bron’s jaw clamped. His mask slipped so that he could not see above her broad, chromium-cinched hips: they turned (not sharply, not angrily, but slowly and, if hips could look tired by themselves, tiredly) in the doorway, moved off into the corridor.
His cheeks were warm. He blinked, growing furious with the discomfort. While he’d been talking to her, he’d been trying to recall exactly why he’d wanted her gone. But she’d thrown him off with that incredible suggestion that it was because she hadn’t responded to his advances! Sometime yesterday—and, yes, it was before the Spike had related that stupid and insulting crack about his being a louse—he’d come to the decision. And, as a decision made, he’d stored it. Coming into the office that morning, in a swirl of black, he had gone straight to Audri’s office and laid it out.
Audri had said: “Oh ... well, all right.”
He’d gone to his own cubicle, gone to work; and had been feeling rather good until minutes ago ... It had been a logical decision. Still, for the life of him, he could not reconstruct the logic, or metalogic, that had generated it.
He thought: If you reach a conclusion validly, you don’t store all the work notes and doodles you’ve amassed on the way. Those are just the things conclusions are there to dispense with! (He crumpled a piece of paper that, looking at its gray, graphed corner sticking from the black-gloved knot, he realized he probably would need again.) She doesn’t like me and I don’t like her. You can’t work in an atmosphere like that. That’s logical!
He put the graphpaper down, pulled off one glove and, with a plastic graph template, began to clean his thumbnail. A bad adolescent nail-biter, he had, at the advent of his ephebic profession, finally broken the habit. But all his nails were now wider edge-to-edge than from cuticle to crown; which still looked a little odd. He didn’t like his hands and, with certain drugs, avoided looking at them at all. Well, today at least, his nails were filed, lacquered, and of even length.
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