It was over!
Some of the women were clapping politely.
She gasped in another breath, overcome with emotion. A terrible script! Devoid of whatever meaning—or was it meaninglessness?—it might have for an audience! But I did give a brilliant performance. I must have gotten carried away with the part. Completely carried away. Her eyes were tearing. She reached for a chair to collapse into, but it was over there, behind the third bar. So she staggered on another few steps. Lord, how many bars were there? But somewhere behind them all there must be a chair. She staggered on, still wracked by the emotions the performance had evoked, one fragment of her mind still aloof and objective: As moved as I was by it, it’s still a terrible part! I mean—she gasped another breath, as the emotions welled on; it was as if the whole production had been some tawdry, twilight melodrama the intellect could not bear but the heart could not resist—I may have been that kind of man. But I am not that type of woman! Hot, buffeting, embarrassing, her emotions roiled and seethed. Oh, I must sit down, she thought, reached out for the chair again—
—and woke, suddenly, completely, and (annoying-ly) with the same question she had drifted off with: Why did I lie to Audri?
The silly dream—its emotional detritus still falling away from the images—certainly didn’t suggest any answer. She turned over once more, with two ques—
tions, now, equally puzzling. First: Where had the lie come from? Second: Why was she so obsessed with it?
Why did I lie?
What could possibly have prompted it?
She lay, coldly and clearly awake: I never lied when I was a man. But thinking, for the hundredth time, over what she had said to Audri, it seemed to have resonances that filtered back through her entire life, the whole of it, on Triton, on Mars, as a man, as a woman. And she could not articulate any of them. You should always tell the truth, she thought, not because one lie leads to another, but rather because one lie could so easily lead you to that terrifying position from which, with just the help of a random dream, you can see, both back and ahead, the morass where truth and falsity are simply, for you, indistinguishable.
Oh, this is crazy, Bron thought suddenly. Why am I lying here, flagellating myself with guilt? I never used to lie: with Audri, or Philip, or anyone. If a situation came up, I faced it! Well, if I could before, I can now. It’s only one slip-up. There’s no reason to start being a moral perfectionist now. That’s not your job. Were women just less truthful than men? All right: Was she less truthful as a woman than she had been as a man? Very well, then that’s just one more thing I need a man to do—to tell the truth for me! Now turn over and go back to sleep!
She turned on her side, then to her back again, one hand against her chin. She bit at a piece of dead skin on her lip; and felt terribly empty. Here I am, she thought, as she had done from time to time ever since she’d come from Mars: Here I am, on Triton, and again I am lost in some hopeless tangle of confusion, trouble, and distress—
But this is so silly!
She breathed deeply and turned to the other side. It was just life and there was nothing logical you could do about it; and if sleep were denied her for the night, then there was nothing to do about that either but wait for dawn, that—suddenly and shockingly!—she was sure, sure for thirty-seven entire seconds (each counted with a louder and louder heart-thud that finally blocked her throat with terror), sure in a way that implied volumes on the rotation of the planets, on the entropy of the chemistry in the sun itself (moving and churning somewhere in the real universe beyond the sensory shield), sure with a surety which, if it were this subjectively complete must be objectivity (and wasn’t that the reason why, her scrambling mind careened on, unable to stop even for the terror, that, in these ice—and rock-bound moons, the subjective was held politically inviolable; and hadn’t they just killed three out of four, or five out of six, to keep it so—? Then, as suddenly, sureness ceased; and she was left, on her side, shaken, with stuttering heart and breath, biting her bleeding lip, with a memory of something that now only seemed—But ... no, not if she had felt like that about it; she had been sure!), sure would never come.
Appendix A.
From The Triton Journaclass="underline" Work Notes and Omitted Pages
“You know,” Sam said pensively, “that explanation of mine this evening—about the gravity business?” They stood in the warm semidark of the co-op’s dining room. “If that were translated into some twentieth-century language, it would come out complete gobbledy-gook. Oh, perhaps an s-f reader might have understood it. But any scientist of the period would have giggled all the way to the bar.”
“S-f?” Bron leaned against the bar.
“‘Scientifiction?’
‘Sci-fi?’
‘Speculative fiction?’
‘Science fiction?’
‘S-f?’—that’s the historical progression of terms, though various of them resurfaced from time to time.”
“Wasn’t there some public-channel coverage about ?”
“That’s right,” Sam said. “It always fascinated me, that century when humanity first stepped onto the first moon.”
“It’s not that long ago,” Bron said. “It’s no longer from us to them than from them to when man first stepped onto the American shore.”
Which left Sam’s heavy-lipped frown so intense Bron felt his temples heat. But Sam suddenly laughed. “Next thing you’ll be telling me is that Columbus discovered America; the bells off San Salvador; the son buried in the Dominican Republic ...”
Bron laughed too, at ease and confused.
“What I mean—” Sam’s hand, large, hot, and moist, landed on Bron’s shoulder—“is that my explanation would have been nonsence two hundred years ago. It isn’t today. The episteme has changed so entirely, so completely, the words bear entirely different charges, even though the meanings are more or less what they would have been in—”
“What’s an episteme?” Bron asked.
“To be sure. You haven’t been watching the proper public-channel coverages.”
“You know me.” Bron smiled. “Annie-shows and ice-operas—always in the intellectual forefront. Never in arears.”
“An episteme is an easy way to talk about the way to slice through the whole—”
“Sounds like the secondary hero in some ice-opera. Melony Episteme, co-starring with Alona Liang.” Bron grabbed his crotch, rubbed, laughed, and realized he was drunker than he’d thought.
“Ah,” Sam said (Was Sam drunk too ... ?), “but the episteme was always the secondary hero of the s-f novel—in exactly the same way that the landscape was always the primary one. If you’d just been watching the proper public channels, you’d know.” But he had started laughing too.
Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).
Text and textus? Text, of course, comes from the Latin textus, which means “web.” In modern printing, the “web” is that great ribbon of paper which, in many presses, takes upwards of an hour to thread from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of inked graphemes upon the “web,” rendering it a text. All the uses of the words “web,”