What she did say, after she had crumpled her coffee bulb in her fist, looked around for a disposal, not found one, so finally tossed it into a corner with a lot of other crumpled bulbs he himself had inelegantly dropped there over the past month, was: “You know, I think you met a friend of mine yesterday over in the u-1. She runs a theater commune ... the Spike?”
What happened next was that his heart began to pound. (The Taj crumbled in a welter of granite, grotte, tile ...) He kept his smile in place, and managed to say, hoarsely, “Oh, you mean you know ... ? Now that’s a coincidence!” The pounding rose so high it hurt his ears—”... the Spike?”—then ebbed.
Over the next six hours, by some process logical, metalogical, or random, he learned that Miriamne lived at the u-1 co-op (Three Fires) which had offered the Spike’s company the empty set of rooms on the basement level; that Miriamne had struck up a friendship with the Spike about a week ago; that the Spike had mentioned to her, last night, that they’d done a performance for someone who probably worked in the big computer hegemony off the Plaza of Light—no, the Spike didn’t know his name, but he was into metalogics and wore one metal eyebrow. During all this, Bron took erasable writing slates out of his drawer, erased some, put them in other drawers, realized he had put them in the wrong drawers, kept smihng, briefed her on the Day Star project (with an explanation that, by the time he was halfway through it he realized, she couldn’t possibly follow because it was simply incoherent, finished it anyway, and discovered she’d followed a good deal more of it than he’d thought), learned that when she’d been hired, she’d been told pretty certainly that she would not end up in her own field but, with things in the economic state they were in, you had to make do with what you could get. When they’d told her they’d try her in Metalogics, why, she’d wondered if she’d run into the tall blonde with the gold eyebrow. Yes, she had been surprised when she realized that he was the person sitting behind the desk, whom she had been assigned to as an assistant. Yes, Tethys was a small city. In the middle of all this, lunch-time came and he told her where the cafeteria was in the building, sent her off up there, having decided to eat something wrapped in plastic by himself in the office. Five minutes after she left, he remembered he was trying to start an affair with the woman. Sending her to lunch alone wasn’t very smart if that was his goal, so he hurried up after her.
Just inside the cafeteria’s double doors stood the Seven Aged Sisters (four of them were women, anyway) in their green, beaded cloaks and silver kerchiefs. A year or so ago they had come to work at the hegemony; rumor had made them, for a few months, something of a hegemony myth. They were the last survivors of some sect they had all joined at three or four years of age, which, for the last eight decades or more, had shunned all literacy, bodily regeneration, and the acquisition of mathematical skills. (What the sect did do, Bron was not sure.) A few years back, however, under the necessity of token devaluation and rising credit demands, there had been a change of sect policy. Using only the General Information drills and instruction programs available through the console of any co-op computer, the seven octogenerians had, in a year and a half, mastered not only basic reading and writing and a grounding in mathematics, but several rather advanced para-math design techniques: they had applied for work, passed proficiency tests, and been hired. Their sect still forbade their partaking of food with nonbe-lievers, but, from some sense of social decorum, they came each lunch hour and stood along the wall, smiling, nodding, exchanging the odd pleasantry with their fellow workers coming in to eat.
Bron nodded to the nearest, then looked across the busy hall. A dozen people were gathered around (yes, of course it was) Tristan and Iseult, the twelve-year-old twin sisters who, six months back, had been promoted to managers of the entire Tethys wing of the hegemony (... more proficiency tests, more phenomenal scores). Tristan, naked, stood scratching her left foot with the big toes of her right, looking very uninterested in everything. Iseult, swathed in diaphanous scarlet from face to feet, was chatting animatedly with the dozen at once. After three months, the girls had asked to be relieved of the taxing executive positions. They said it interfered with their other interests. They were now, again, working as credit technique assayers. But, so the rumor went, they’d retained their quadruple-slot credit rise.
As Bron looked from the vegetarian counter on the left, across the busy room, to the special diet line on the right, he experienced, for the boring, hundred-thousandth time, that moment of discomfort and alienation: most of these people, as reasonable and as happy as he was, lived in the mixed-sex co-ops he had once tried, but found too tedious and too annoying to bear. Most of them—though not necessarily the same most—lived in co-ops where sex was overt and encouraged and insistently integrated with all aspects of co-operative life ... fine in theory, but in practice their most annoying and tedious aspect. (A very few [slightly less than one out of five] like Philip—who was standing on the other side of the hall, rubbing his beard on his wrist and talking to three, junior programmers, whose sex Bron could not even distinguish [though one of them was naked] for the men and women passing between—lived in complex family communes.) Philip was the boss Bron definitely did not like.
Where was Miriamne anyway?
During Bron’s first year in the Satellites, in Lux, he’d thought he might like a physical job, working with his hands, with his body—after all, he’d come from a physical job on Mars. He’d trained, he’d studied, he’d tested; and had gotten work at a large light-metal refectory (heavy metals were rarer and rarer as you got further and further from the sun). He’d hated the job; he was totally frustrated by the people. From there, he’d spent three weeks at a training program at a Pro-tyyn recycling combine—that was so unpleasant it had decided him to forsake the moons of Saturn for the moons of Neptune. (Jupiter was on the other side of the sun; they were discouraging emigration to Ganymede that year.) Then there’d been the public-channel job.