An area of the cafeteria floor, blackened and strewn with burnt metal, was roped off. Every minute, one of the Seven Aged Sisters, in beaded green and silver, would leave her (or his) position by the cafeteria door, and come to walk, slowly, around the blistered enclosure (Bron stepped back from the taped rope to let the Sister pass), pausing every seventh step to make sacred and purifying signs, then, on completing his (or her) circuit, exchange serious words and nod dolefully with one or more of the spectators. (Just like the cafeteria of that Lux, Protyyn-recycling plant, Bron reflected Absolutely no difference at all!) Some of the statue’s motors, still working fitfully, now and then flapped a coruscated stub of aluminum around, twenty feet along the frame (which shook and clanked and tottered from floor to ceiling), while, somewhere else among the struts still standing, another metal plate tried to tug away from some twisted shape to which it had fused, the whole, charred horror attesting, perhaps more than the silvery creation intended, to the dark and terrible import of art.
Bron backed away, trying to envision the undamaged work, while others moved in to take her place at the rope. She had already decided that this lunch the meal would be a carnivorous one, and so was angling to tfce left, away from the vegetarian counter, when somebody put a hand on her shoulder.
She turned.
“Beautiful!” Philip exclaimed, a grin splitting his beard’s knap. “Audri told me, but of course I wouldn’t believe it till I saw—” Philip made a gesture with the backs of both hirsute hands toward Bron’s breasts. “Gorgeous .... ! This is permanent, now?”
“Yes,” Bron said, wishing they were not in the middle of the floor.
“Here,” Philip said. “Let’s get out of the middle of the floor,” and put his hand on Bron’s shoulder again, which Bron wished he wouldn’t do, to guide her over to the booths. But then Philip was touch-ish with all the female employees, Bron had noted before, sometimes with envy, sometimes with annoyance. (He was touch-ish with the male employees too, which, before, had just been annoying.) “And this ... um, goes all the way down?” Philip asked.
Bron did not quite sigh. “That’s right.”
“Just marvelous.” Philip dropped his hand but craned around to stare. “I can’t get over those tits! I’m green with jealousy!” He covered his slightly loose pectoral with spread fingers. (Philip had come in naked today.) “I have to make do with one; and then it’s just up and down like a leaky balloon. Bron, I want you to know I’m really impressed. I think you’ve probably found yourself. Finally. I think you just may have. It’s got that feeling about it, you know—”
Bron was about to say, Shove it, Philip, will you? when Audri said:
“Hey, there. Is Philip ragging you? Why don’t you lay off Bron, and let her get her lunch, huh?”
“Yeah,” Philip said. ‘“Sure. Get your lunch. We’re sitting right over there.” He gestured at a booth somewhere beyond the blackened disaster. “See you when you get back.”
As she moved through the line, Bron remembered her thought with Lawrence: A11 men have some rights, and considered it against her annoyance with Philip. Philip was certainly closer to the type of man she’d set herself to be interested in than, say, Lawrence. What, she wondered, would Philip be like in bed? The blus-teriness would transform to firmness. The honesty would become consideration. Philip (she considered, with distaste) would never think of lying on top of someone lighter than he was without invitation. And he would have some particularly minor kink (like really getting off on licking your ear) which he’d expect you to cooperate with and be just annoyingly obliging about cooperating with any of yours. In short, what she knew from the information left over from that other life: Philip was as sexually sure of himself as Bron had been. She had recognized it before. She recognized it now. And Philip was still (with his hand on the shoulder and his unstoppable frankness) the most annoying person she knew—plurality female configuration or not, she thought grimly. It was not that she felt no attraction; but she could certainly understand how, with men like Philip around, you could get to not like the feeling.
“Excuse me ... ?” someone said.
She said: “Oh, I’m so ...” and took her tray and started around the cafeteria.
She saw their booth, went toward it.
As she neared, she was sure she heard Philip say:
“... still doesn’t like to be touched,” and thought, as she took her place across from him, I didn’t hear the pronoun, but if I had and it was ‘he,’ I’d kill him. But the conversation was on Day Star and how the war seemed to have improved the personalities of two of the representatives, and what had happened to the third? No, he wasn’t a war casualty, that much had been established. (And wasn’t Lux just terrifying? Five million people!) One of the junior programmers said morosely: “I used to live in Lux,” which, even for a u-l’er, was incredibly gross. About the table, people’s eyes caught one another’s, then dropped to their trays, till someone picked up the conversation’s thread: But he had disappeared ... In the midst of these speculations, Philip leaned his elbows on the table and asked: “Say, where’re you living now?”
Bron told him the name of the women’s co-op.
“Mmm,” Philip said, and nodded. “I was just thinking, back when I was married—my second marriage, actually—my second wife was a transexual ... ?”
“When were you married?” asked the junior programmer, who wore a silver body-stocking from head to toe, with large black circles all over, and sat wedged in by the wall. “You’re not an earthie. They don’t even do that too much on Mars, now.”
The programmer, Bron realized. She was probably from Mars.
“Oh, I used to spend quite a bit of time in your u-1; you can make any kind of contract you want there: that’s why we’ve got it ... But that was back when I was a very dumb, and very idealistic kid. Like I was saying, my wife had started out as a man—”
“How’d she stack up to old Bron here?” the programmer asked.
“I pretend to be crude,” Philip said, leaning forward and speaking around Audri, “but you really are! She was great—” He settled back. “The marriage, however, was three or four times as bad as absolutely any sociologist I’d ever read on the subject said it would be, back when I was a student at Lux. And you know, I still had to do it two more times before I learned my lesson? But I was young then—that was my religious phase. Anyway; after we broke up and she left the mixed co-op where we were living, she moved into a straight, women’s co-op for a while—I mean, she was about as heterosexual as you can get, which may have been part of the problem, but nevertheless: then she moved into another women’s co-op that was nonspecific. I remember she said she thought it was a lot nicer—I mean, as far as she was concerned. They were a lot more accepting of general, nonsexual eccentricities and things like that, you know? It was a place called the Eagle, if I remember. It’s still going. If you have any problems with your place, you might bear it in mind.”
“I will,” Bron said.
The next day another memo came down from the Art Department. It seemed that, independently, twenty-seven people had come up with the suggestion that the memorial, in its new version, be titled The Horrors of War and so displayed in the hegemony museum. This suggestion had been duly passed on to the sculptor, in the hospital, who was apparently in touch enough to make the following reply: “No Nol
Flatly and bluntly No Title too banal for words! Sorry, art just does not work that way! (If you must name it something, name it after the last head of your whole, ugly operation!) It is my job to make works that you may get anything out of you wish. It is not my job to teach you how to make them! Leave me alone. You have done enough to me already.” And so Tristan and Iseult: A War Memorial was transferred upstairs, where from time to time Bron, on her way to the office library, stopped in to see it among the other dozens of works on exhibit. The burned and broken bits were all in a large carton near one base, where they gazed up at her like ashy skulls in which you could
not quite find the eyes.
Bron kept the memo in her drawer. She cut the words of the old sculptor out of the flimsy to take home and hang on her wall. They had struck some chord; it was the first thing in her new life that seemed to indicate that there might be something to live for in the world besides being reasonable or happy. (Not that it was art—any more than it was religion!) And two weeks later, with Lawrence carrying the smaller packages, Bron moved from the straight Cheetah into the unspecified Eagle.
“Oh, this is much nicer,” Lawrence said, when they finally got things organized in the room. “I mean, everybody seems so much more relaxed here than back at the place I got for you.”
“As long as they don’t try to be so damned friendly,” Bron said, “and stay out of my hair, it’s got to be an improvement.”
After Lawrence left, she looked for the piece of flimsy to tape to the inside of her door. But it had gotten misplaced or dropped somewhere; at any rate, she couldn’t find it.
She had been living at the women’s co-op (the Eagle) six months now. This one had been working out well. On the fourteenth day of the nineteenth paramonth of the second yearN, at four o’clock (announced the lights around the Plaza), she considered once more, as she came out of the office lobby onto the crowded Plaza of Light, walking home—and, once more, decided against it: Just after lunch Audri had stopped her in the hall with raised finger and lowered brows: “You, I’m afraid, have been falling down in your work, Bron. No, it’s nothing serious, but I just thought I better mention it before it got serious. Your efficiency index blinks a little shakily on the charts. Look, we all know you’ve had a lot to adjust to—”
“Did Philip say something?” Bron had asked.
“Nope. And he won’t for at least another two weeks—which is why I’m mentioning it now. Look, just give it a little thought, see if there’s anything you can think of that would help you get it together. And let me know. Even if it’s something outside of work. Okay?” Audri smiled.
Back in her office cubicle, Bron had pondered. Once or twice she had consciously thought that she must be ready for her work to mean less to her than before; but that was supposed to happen only at the materialization of the proper man—though nothing like that man had come anywhere near materializing.
Take stock, she’d decided. What, she wondered, would her clinic counselor say? Leave an hour early, perhaps; walk home. Only, while she’d been pondering, closing time had crept up.
She would be satisfied with the usual transport and just stock-taking.
She went into the transport-station kiosk and down to the third level, which was rumored to be (fractionally) warmer and therefore (rumored to be) fractionally less crowded: the transport hissed in and, as the door slid back, a sign unrolled across it (simultaneously, inside, people stretched signs across the windows:
LUNA
RELIEF
ASSOCIATION
red letters blared on blue tissue.) The one across the door (orange on black on green on pink) said:
Bursting through the tissue, men and women began to distribute leaflets; the first passengers behind them were coming off, shoulders and heads brushing orange shreds.
“Really,” a man, wearing several rubber-rimmed privacy disks about his head, arms, and legs, said, “you’d think they could confine that sort of thing to the unlicensed sector. I mean, that’s why we’ve got it.”
A woman on the other side of him (apparently not with him) said testily: “Just think of it as theater.”
Bron looked. The disk the man wore around his forehead cut the woman’s profile at the nose. The man stepped from between them; Bron suddenly stopped breathing, stared.
The Spike glanced at her, frowned, started to say something, looked away, looked back, frowned again; then a politely embarrassed smile: “I’m sorry, for a moment you reminded me of a man I ...” She frowned again. “Bron ... ?”
“Hello ...” Bron said, softly, because her throat had gone dead dry; her heart knocked slow and hard enough to shake her in her sandals. “Hello, Spike ... how are ... ?”
“How are vow?” the Spike countered. “Well, this certainly—” She blinked at Bron—“is a surprise!”
There was a rising hiss of escaping air. “Oh—” the Spike said. “There goes my transport!”
Arriving passengers surged around them.
Bron said, suddenly: “Spike, come on! You want to get out of here and walk for a stop or two?”
The Spike was obviously considering several answers. The one she chose was: “No. I don’t want to, Bron ... Did you get the letter I wrote you—”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I did! Thank you. Really, thank you for explaining things to me.”
“I wrote it to take care of this when it happened, Bron. Because I knew it would. Oh, I don’t mean ... But really; No, I don’t want to walk a few stops with you: do you understand?”
“But I’ve changed!”
“So I’ve noticed.” Then she smiled again.
“Your letter was part of that, too.” Bron was trying to remember what exactly had been in the letter, other than its general crotchety tone. But that was part of her life which, day by day, had seemed less necessary to remember, easier to forget. “Please, Spike. I’m not the same person I was. And I ... I just feel I have to ... talk to you!”
The Spike hesitated; then the smile became a laugh, that had behind it, like a dozen echoes, some dozen other times she had laughed and Bron had thrilled. “Look ... I guess you have been through some changes. All right, I’ll walk you down another stop. Then we go on our ways, okay?”
As they reached the steps to the pedestrian corridor, a memory returned of another day when they had walked together, laughing, when suddenly the Spike had begun to complain that Bron was always talking about herself—Well, she had changed. She wondered what she might talk about to prove it.
At the side of the corridor, just before the street, stood a (“Know Your Place in Society”) kaleidoscopi-cally-colored booth. “Have you ever actually been in one of those?”
The Spike said: “What?”
“Every once in a while I go in just to see what the government’s got on me, you know?” They passed the booth, walked on into the street, under the sensory shield’s paler swirls. “A lot of people pride themselves on never going into one at all. But then, I’ve always sort of prided myself on being the type who does the things no one else would be caught dead doing. I guess the last time I went into one was about a month back—or maybe six weeks. I don’t know whether they’ve done it on purpose or not; Brian—that’s my counsellor at the clinic—says it’s more or less government policy, though there have been exceptions which she thinks are just government slipups, which I sort of doubt. I mean, whether you approve of it or disapprove, the government is usually right. Anyway, they only show clips taken since my operation. Isn’t that amazing? Perhaps this is their own, bizarre way of showing that they care—” Bron stopped, because the Spike was looking at another group of Luna-Reliefers: across the street, “Luna Is a Moon Too!” waved on bright placards.
“You don’t see any Terra Relief around,” the Spike said, suddenly, with the same bitterness Bron had heard in her comment to the man back on the transport platform. “After all, that’s where we did the damage.”
“That’s right, you don’t,” Bron said. And then: “You must have gotten out just in time.” She frowned. “Or were you there through it?”
“I got out,” the Spike said. “What did you want to talk about?”
“Well, I ... I guess there wasn’t anything specific but ... well I just wanted ...” And Bron realized there was nothing to say; nothing of any importance at all. “What are you doing, Spike? I guess the company’s going pretty well now.”
“Actually, we’re sort of in hibernation. Maybe we’ll get together again someday; but once the endowment ran out, we more or less disbanded.”
“Oh.”
“I’m teaching right now, in the rot
ation circuit for Lux.”
“University?”
“That’s right. You know the city was completely wiped out. But the University is practically a separate suburb, under a separate shield, with a separate atmosphere and separate gravity control. The sabotage was pretty well set up to pass it by. Maybe that was Earth’s way of showing they cared?”
Bron couldn’t really think of much to answer. “I
guess because you’re working for the University is why you’re out here instead of your usual haunts in the u-1.”
“Mmm,” the Spike said. “I’m doing a month of lectures on Jacque Lynn Col ton. After I finish here and on to Neriad, I’ll be going back to Io, Europa, Ganymede ...” She shrugged. “It’s the usual rotation. Somehow, though, under the University—even on the run—just isn’t the place to do creative work. At least, not for me. They’ve promised me some direction as soon as I get back. I’m working on plans for simultaneous, integrated productions of La Vida Es Sueho, Phedra, and The Tyrant—one cast for all three, all on the same stage, with both cast and audience using the new concentration drugs. The University has already used them to allow people to listen to four or five lectures at once, but nobody’s tried to use them for anything aesthetically interesting.”
“I thought ... um, macro-theater wasn’t your field?” Bron said, wondering where the information came from, or if it was even right.
The Spike laughed. “Macro-theater is just a lot of coordinated micro-theater productions done one right after another without a break.”
“Oh,” Bron said again. Three plays at once sounded too confusing even to ask about. “Are you still with Windy and what’s-her-name?”
“Charo. No, not really. Charo’s here on Triton; and we see each other, get drunk together, and reminisce about old times. She’s a pretty spectacular kid.”
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