Triton

by Samuel Delany

He looked at her shoulders, hunched in concentration. He suppressed the next chuckle. There was nothing to do: for the duration she simply must be the prostitute, and he must play the client. She was the young, inexperienced hustler, committing all the vulgarities and gaucheries natural to the situation. He must be charmed, be indulgent, assured in his own knowledge of the proper. Otherwise, he thought, I shall never get through the evening without laughing at her outright.

  She was, he realized, reading the whole thing—which, frankly, was more like a diligent tourist. The real pleasure, of course, was in the amounts, and those you could get at a glance: they were printed in boldface.

  The footmen, at the four corners of the chamber, sat at little tables that folded from the wall. Tables? Sitting? That was bizarre. What, he reflected, was a footman for if he (or she) did not remain on foot?

  The chamber rocked. Ripples rained the drapes. He touched the Spike’s arm. “I think we’re on our way ....”

  She looked up, looked around, and laughed. They rocked, they jogged. On a view window a darkness, either clouds or mountains, moved. “This thing must date back from when they first got gravity under control!” she exclaimed. “I doubt if I’ve ever been in a piece of transportation as old as this before!” She put her hand on his, squeezed it.

  Moments later, they locked course; the jogging stopped. On cue, one of the footmen rose, walked toward them, stepping gingerly among the cushions, stopped before them, and inclined her head: “Would you like a drink before dinner ... ?”

  And in one horrifying moment, Bron realized he could not remember the name of that most expensive of drinks! What leapt to his mind was the name of that one, indeed, tastier, but cheaper—and by which one always rated clients Definitely Second Rate (far and above the most usual type) if they ordered it, or even suggested it.

  The Spike was reading the Tarif again.

  Discomfort concealed—Bron was sure it was concealed—he touched her arm once more. “My dear, the footman would like to know if you wanted anything.”

  Her eyes came up. Smiling, she gave an embarrassed little shrug. “Oh, I don’t—well ... really ...”

  He’d hope the misremembered name had passed her eyes, that its huge price had caught them.

  She blinked at him, still smiling, still confused.

  It hadn’t. (She would make a lousy whore, he thought, a trifle less fondly.) He said: “Do you have any ... Gold Flower Nectar?” The small of his back moistened; but it was the only name he could remember. (His forehead moistened too.) “No—No ... I think we’ll have something more expensive. I mean, you must have something more expensive that ... well, don’t you ... ?”

  “We have Gold Flower Nectar,” the young woman said, nodding. “Shall I bring two?”

  A drop of sweat ran down his arm, inside Sam’s borrowed sleeve. Seconds into the silence, the Spike said, glancing back and forth between the footmen and Bron, “Yes! That sounds marvelous.”

  The footman nodded, started to turn, then, with a quizzical expression, asked: “You’re from Mars, aren’t you?” Bron thought: She thinks I’m a cheap Bellona John and the Spike is a really dumb whore! A sweat drop ran out of his sideburn and down his jaw.

  The Spike laughed again. “No. I’m afraid we’re moonies. We’re part of the cultural exchange program.”

  “Oh.” The woman nodded, smiled. “We keep Gold Flower Nectar mostly for the Martian clients—it really is very good,” which went directly to Bron, with a wink. “Earthies hardly ever even know about it!” She bowed again, turned, and went back between the curtains behind her table.

  The Spike took Bron’s arm now, leaned closer. “Isn’t that marvelous! She thought we were from a worldl” She giggled. For a moment her forehead touched his cheek. (He almost flinched.) “I know it’s all play-acting, but it really is exciting ... if only as theater.”

  “Well ...” he said, trying to smile, “I’m glad you’ie enjoying yourself.”

  She squeezed his wrist. “And the way you seem to know exactly what’s going on, you really are the perfect person to go with!”

  “Well ... thank you,” he said. “Thank you,” because he could think of nothing else to say.

  “Tell me ...” And once more she leaned. “Isn’t ‘footmen’ a masculine word, though—I mean on Earth?”

  Though he was no longer perspiring, he felt miserable. Her attempt at distraction merely goaded. Bron shrugged. “Oh, well ... isn’t ’e-girl’ a feminine one?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but this is Earth, where such things traditionally—I’ve been led to understand—matter.”

  He shrugged again, wishing that she would simply leave him alone. The footman returned, drinks on a mirrored tray.

  He handed the Spike hers, took his. “Why don’t you let me pay as we go along,” he suggested.

  “It would be just as convenient if you paid at the end,” the footman said, still smiling, but a little less. “Though if you’d prefer ... ?”

  The Spike sipped. “From what we hear at home, convenience is supposed to be very important on Earth. Why don’t we do it that way?” Then she glanced at Bron; who nodded.

  The footman nodded too—“Thank you—” and retired to her table.

  Bron sipped the drink, whose flavor was all nostalgia, all memory, all of which announced so blaringly that it was not fifteen years ago (when he had last tasted it), that this was not Mars: that there were footwomen here instead of footmen; that convenience was the tradition (Then why, he wondered, momentarily angry, indulge an institution whose only purpose was inconvenient extravagance?), and that he was an uninitiate tourist.

  No!

  Play-acting it may be!

  But that was a role he could not accept Both temperament and experience, however inadequate and outdated, denied it. He turned to the beaming Spike. “You still haven’t told me how the performance went this evening.”

  “Ah ...” she said, leaning back and crossing her bare feet on the cushions before her, “the performance ... !”

  Three times (Bron sat, dreading each one) the other three footmen offered them (the Spike liked Gold Flower Nectar—well, he liked it too. But that wasn’t the point) another drink, the second with the traditional nuts, the third with small fruits—olives, which he remembered as the hallmark of the best places. They offered three kinds, too: black, green, and yellow. He was impressed, which depressed him more. The client’s job was to impress, not be impressed. It was the client’s iob to supervise effects, to oversee, to direct the excellent performance. It was not, at this point anyway, her (or his) place to be carried away. With the next drink, they were offered a tray of small fish and meat delicacies, served on savory pastrv bases. With the last, thev were offered sweets, which Bron refused. “Afterwards,” he explained to her. “they’ll probably have some quite incredible confections, so we can pass these up in all good faith.”

  She nodded appreciatively.

  Then, there was light through the view window. Excitedly, the Spike leaned across him to look. The chamber began to jog and jerk. Abruptly the jerking ceased: they’d landed. The purple-pommed wall-ramp let down on its chains. Outside lights blazed in the distance and the darkness. The footmen rose to take their positions at the ramp’s four corners.

  As they were walking between the first two, Bron said (In his mind he had gone over just how to say it several times): “/ think it was presumptuous to assume we were from Mars—or the Satellites. Or anyplace. How should they know, just from what we order, where we’re from?” He didn’t say it loudly. But he didn’t say it softly, either.

  By the end of his statement, his glance, which had gone with calculated leisure around the night, reached the Spike—who was frowning. With folded arms, she slowed at the edge of the plush (by the last footman). “I suspect,” she said, with one slightly raised eyebrow, “it was because you called them ‘footmen.’ On the Explication de Tarif they’re called ‘hostesses.’

  ‘Footmen’ is probably th
e Martian term.”

  Bron frowned, wondering why she chose that statement to slow down on. “Oh ...” he said, stepping from the end of the ramp, his eyes again going around the rocks, the railing, the waterfall. “Oh, well ... of course. Well, perhaps we’d better ...”

  But the Spike, walking too, moved on a step ahead.

  Beyond the red velvet ropes that railed the curving walk, rocks broke away, broke away further. Floodlights, lighting this tree or that bush, made the sky black and close as a u-1 ceiling.

  “Isn’t it odd,” the Spike said, her statement oddly tangent to Bron’s thoughts, “you can’t tell whether it’s endless or enclosed—the whole space, I mean.”

  Bron looked over another rail, where the torrents crashed. Above, was the moon. “I think ...” he said (she turned to look too), “it’s endless.”

  “Oh, I didn’t even see that!” Her arm brushed his as she stepped around him to the rope. “Why it’s—”

  “Look,” he said, not meaning the scenery. She looked back at him. “I think, convenience or no, I must pay them now—if only for the theater.” And before she could comment, or protest, he went back to the purple platform.

  Bron stopped before the nearest, gold-skinned footman, his hand on his purse. “You served us that last drink, didn’t you?—and it was certainly a marvelous one, considering my thirst and the exhausting day I’ve had till now. Whatever it says on the menu ... ten, eleven? Twelve ♦ .. ?” (It had said eight-fifty.) He fingered into the drawn, leather neck—“Well, your smile alone made it worth half again that much.”—and pulled out two bills, the top one the twenty he’d expected. “Do you want it—?”

  The footman’s gilded lids widened.

  “Do you ... ?”

  Separating the twenty off from the other bill (which was a thirty), Bron stepped up on the platform, held the bill high overhead. “Here it is, then—jump for it! Jump!”

  The footman hesitated a moment, bit at her golden, lower lip, eyes still up, then leaped, grabbing Bron’s shoulder.

  He let go of the bill. While it fluttered, he shrugged off her hand and stepped toward the next footman, the next bill in his fingers. “But you, my dear—” He felt ridiculous engaging in such banter, however formalized, with women—“you provided the first one, the one that relieved the parching thirst we arrived with. That alone triples the price! Here, my energetic one—” He held the note down beside his knee. “Do you want it? There it is. Crawl for it! Crawl ... !” He let the bill flutter to the ground, and turned again, as the woman dove after it. “And you two—” He pulled out two more bills, one in each hand—“don’t think I’ve forgotten the services you rendered. Yet ... somehow though I remember, I cannot quite distinguish them. Here is a twenty and a thirty. You may fight over which one of you deserves which.” He tossed the two bills up in the air, and stepped over one of the women who was already down on her knees, scrabbHng after one of the others. Behind him, he heard the second two start to go at it.

  Bron stepped from the platform (cries; scufrlings; more cries behind him) and walked toward the Snike. She stood with palms pressed together at her chin, eyes wide, mouth opened—suddenly she bent with laughter.

  Bron glanced back to where, on the pommed purple, the four footmen scuffled, laughing and pummeling one another.

  “That’s ...” the Spike began, but broke up again. “That’s marvelous!”

  Bron took her arm and turned her along the walkway.

  Still laughing, she craned back to look. “If it wasn’t so perfect in itself, I’d use it in a production!” Her eyes came back to his. “I’d never have thought money could still do that ... ?”

  “Well, considering the mythology behind it, and its rarity—”

  The Spike laughed again. “I suppose so, but—”

  “I spent a spell as a footman myself, once,” Bron said, which wasn’t exactly untrue: he had once shared a room in Bellona with two other prostitutes who had; and had even been offered a job ... something’d come up, though. “It gets to you.”

  “That’s really incredible!” The Spike shook her head. Tm surprised they don’t tear it to pieces!”

  “Oh, you learn,” Bron said. “And of course, like all of this, it’s all basically just a kind of ... well, Annie-show.” He gestured toward the rocks, the sky, the falls, which ran under the transparent section of path they walked over (moss, froth, and clear swirls of green passed beneath his black boots and her bare feet) toward fanning columns of green glass that were the Craw’s entrance.

  The Spike rubbed a finger on her gauntlet. “This—if you look closely—has logarithmic scales. The middle band turns, so you can use it as a sort of slide rule.” She laughed. “From what I’ve always heard, you needed a computer to figure almost anything to do with money. But I guess somebody used to it gets by on pure flamboyance.”

  Bron laughed now. “Well, it helps to know what you’re doing. It is dangerous. It’s addictive, no question. But I think the Satellites’ making it illegal is going too far. And you just couldn’t set up anything on this scale in the u-1.” The columns, seventy or eighty of them he could see, rose perhaps a hundred feet. “Besides, I doubt it would even catch on. We’re—you’re just the wrong temperament out there ... I mean, I like living in a voluntaristic society. With money, though, I suppose getting your hands on a bit once or twice a year is enough.”

  “Oh, certainly ...” The Spike folded her arms, glanced back between them again. Bron put his arm round her shoulder.

  He glanced back too.

  The ramp had closed; the footmen were gone.

  There were other walkways, other craft, other people ambling among the rocks.

  Another footman, breasts and hips and hair dull bronze, stood beside what looked like a green ego-booster booth, curtained with multi-colored sequins. Bron pressed a small bill into the dull bronze palm. “Please ... ?”

  She turned, drew the curtain. The interior was white enamel. The man who stepped out wore the traditional black suit with black silk lapels, black cummerbund, and small black bow at the collar of his white, white shirt. “Good evening, Mr Helstrom.” He stepped forward, smiled, nodded—“Good evening, ma’am.”—smiled, nodded to the Spike, who, somewhat taken aback, said:

  “Uh ... hello!”

  “How nice to see you tonight. We’re delighted that you decided to drop by this evening. Let’s all just go this way—” They were already walking together among the first fanning pillars of marbled green—“and we’ll see what we can do about finding you a table. What mood are you in tonight ... water? fire? earth? air? ... perhaps some combination? Which would you prefer?”

  Bron turned, smiled at the Spike. “Your choice—?”

  “Oh, well, I ... I mean, I don’t know what ... well, could we have all four? Or would that be ... ?” She looked questioningly at Bron.

  “One could ...” The majordomo smiled.

  “But I think,” Bron said, “it might be a bit distracting.” (She was charming ... All four? Really!) “We’ll settle for earth, air, and water; and leave fire for another time.” He looked at the Spike. “Does that suit you ... ?”

  “Oh, certainly,” she said, quickly.

  “Very well, then. Just come this way.”

  And they were beyond the columns. The domo, though pleasant, Bron decided, was getting away with only the bare necessities. Those little extras of personality and elan that individualized the job, the evening, the experience (“. , . that you can never pay for but, nevertheless, you do” as one rather witty client of his had once put it) were missing. Of course, they were something you got by revisiting such a place frequently—not by being a tourist. But Bron was sure he looked used to such places; and the Spike’s evident newness to the whole thing should have elicited some more humane reaction. They certainly looked like they might come back.

  “Just up here.”

  The domo led them onto the grass ... Yes, they were inside. But the ceiling, something bright
and black and multilayered and interleaved, was very far away.

  “Excuse me ... this way, sir.”

  “Uh?” Bron looked down. “Of course.” It was, very simply, Bron realized, that he did not like the man.

  “This grass ... !” the Spike exclaimed. “It feels so wonderful to walk on!” She ran a few steps up the slope, turned and, with an ecstatic shrug, beamed back at them.

  Bron smiled, and noticed that the domo’s professional smile had softened a little. Which damped Bron’s own a bit.

  “We roll it once a day and trim it twice a week,” the majordomo said. “It’s nice when someone notices and actually bothers to comment.”

  The Spike held out her hand to Bron, who walked up, took it.

  “It is a beautiful place!” she said; and to the domo: “Which way did you say ... ?”

  The domo, still smiling, and with a slight bow—“This way, then.”—started up the slope, in a direction Bron noticed was not the one they’d begun in.

  The waterfall crashing outside apparently began in here, several levels above. For almost ten minutes they could hear it. Between high rocks, they climbed—

  “Oh, my ...” the Spike whispered.

  —and saw it.

  “Will this do?” The domo pulled out one of the plush chairs, moved around the table on the grass, pulled out the other.

  They were practically at the top of the immense en-closure. Water frothed beside them, rushing away down the rocks, both in front and in back of them. They had a view of tier after tier of the restaurant.

  “What a breathtaking location ... !” the Spike exclaimed.

  “Some people don’t like to walk this far,” the domo explained. “But you seemed to be enjoying yourself. Personally, I think it’s worth it.”

  Bron9s hand was on his purse, prepared to offer the ritual bill and the ritual request for a better table. But it was a good location. Really, he thought, you shouldn’t accept the first place they showed you—clients never did on Mars; besides, he wanted to make the man work.

  “Sir ... ?” The majordomo raised an attendant eyebrow.