Still, just to stand around the cafeterias in any of the four places for an hour, watching the people come and go, overhearing snatches of conversation, reviewing the emblems of their quotidian concerns, really, save for the fact two were on Iapetus and this was Triton, you could hardly tell them apart.
Miriamne, with her tray, was coming off the vegetarian line.
He started for her, among the workers moving here and there.
“Hello,” she said. “You changed your mind?” Then she looked over his shoulder.
Bron looked too.
Philip, barefoot as Tristan, in an antiseptically white jumpsuit, walked toward them. A red plastic V was pinned, with brass clips, to his chest.
“Oh, hey, Phil ... ?” Bron turned. “This is Miriamne, the new assistant Audri brought me this morning. Philip’s my other boss, which sort of makes him your boss, too ... or did you two meet before already?”
“We met,” Philip said. “As I told you before, if
Bron treats you badly ... I’m repeating this now because I don’t like saying things behind people’s backs—you kick him—” Philip raised his foot and swung his toe lightly against Bron’s calf (Philip’s ankle was incredibly hairy)—“right here. Bron sprained his knee earlier this year—” which was true—“and I don’t believe he had it attended to properly. It should cause him a great deal of pain.”
Bron laughed. “Philip is a real comic.” No, he did not like Philip at all.
Miriamne said: “I overheard someone say those two kids over there were head of this whole operation a few months ago ... ?”
“Yeah,” Philip said. “And it ran a whole lot smoother than it does now. Of course, that could just be all the pressure from the war.”
Miriamne glanced at the group still gathered around the twins, shook her head with a little smile. “I wonder what they’ll be doing in ten years.”
“I doubt they’ll even stay in business,” Philip said. “That kind never do. // they do, by the time they’re twenty-five, they’ll probably have started a family. Or a religion, if they don’t. Speaking of families, some of our kids are downstairs and waiting for me. Will you excuse me?” Philip walked away. To his back was pinned, by brass clips, a red plastic N.
Frowning after him, Bron said: “Come on, I’ll get some lunch. You go find a booth.”
There were booths all around the halclass="underline" for eating and reading, for eating and talking, for eating and silent meditation, private booths for anything you wanted—if she’d chosen one of these, Bron, with that little gesture of the hand, would have made his intentions clear right then.
But she had chosen one for conversation.
So, for the rest of the lunch-hour (he realized what he’d been doing two minutes before it was time to go back to work), he asked her about the Spike, the theater commune, some more about the Spike—not really, he pondered as they rode down the escalator to the Metalogics Department in the second subbasement, the way to get things off on the proper foot. Well, he had the rest of the day.
The rest of the day continued in the same wise, till, when she asked could she leave ten minutes early because, after all, there wasn’t really anything to do today and she would make up the time once she got more into the actual work, and he said sure, and she mentioned she was walking back to her co-op, and Bron, remembering that after all he was trying to start an affair with her, asked if she minded his walking with her and, no, it wasn’t out of his way, he took a roundabout route through the u-1 frequently: she frowned and, a bit sullenly, agreed. Fifteen minutes later, when they turned off the Plaza of Light, down the deserted alley toward the underpass, he remembered again that he was trying to start an affair with her and put his hand on the gray shoulder of her cape: perhaps this was the time to openly signal his intentions—
Miriamne said: “Look, I know it’s a lot of pressure on you, having to teach somebody to do a job they’re not trained for or even very interested in, but I also get the feeling, about every half an hour, when you can get your mind back in it, that you’re coming on to me.”
“Me?” Bron leaned a little closer and smiled. “Now why ever should you think that?”
“I’d better explain,” she said. “The co-op where I live is all women.”
The Spike’s laugh returned to him, pulsing with his heartbeat which, for the second time, began to pound. “Oh, hey ...” He dropped his hand. “Hey, I’m sorry—it’s gay?”
“Ifs not,” she said. “But / am.”
“Oh.” Bron took a breath, his heart still mangling blood and air in his chest. “Hey, really, I wasn’t ... I mean, I didn’t know.”
“Sure,” she said. “That’s why I thought I ought to say something. I mean, I’m just not into men in any way, shape, or form right now. You understand?”
“Oh, sure, of course.”
“And I don’t feel like getting yelled at later for leading you on, because I’m not. I’m just trying to be pleasant with somebody I have to work with who looks like a fairly pleasant guy. That’s all.”
“Really,” he said. “I understand. Most people who live in single-sex, nonspecific co-ops aren’t into men or women that much. I know. / live in one.”
“You got it.” She smiled. “If you want to go back to the Plaza, now, and catch your transport—?”
“No. Honestly, I do walk home this way ... a lot of times. That’s how I met Spike—the Spike—yesterday.”
Miriamne shrugged, walked on, but at a distance that, as they neared the arch, widened. It’s not sullen-ness, he realized suddenly: She’s as preoccupied as I am. With what? he wondered. And, heaving into his mind, oppressive as a iceberg and bright as a comet, was the Spike’s face. No (he narrowed his eyes at Miriamne, who was a step ahead), she said the Spike was just her friend: Like me and Lawrence, he thought. Then, the sudden questioning: Does she feel about the Spike the way Lawrence is always saying he feels about ... ? His eyes narrowed further at the gray-caped shoulders ahead. I’ll kill her! he thought. I’ll make her sorry she ever heard of metalogics! Miriamne, staggering, drunk, in the co-op corridor, grasping at the Spike, caught in her arms, falling down soused on the corridor floor ... He thought: I’ll—Miriamne glanced back. “You’re looking preoccupied again.”
“Huh?” he said. “Oh. I guess I am.” He smiled: I will kill her. I’ll kill her in some slow and lingering way that will hurt amazingly and unbelievably and continuously and will seem to have no source and take years.
But, with her own preoccupations, Miriamne looked away.
Out of the archway, papers blew across the asphalt—a dozen printed flyers swirled their shins.
One pasted itself to Miriamne’s calf. She tried to sidestep it, couldn’t, so finally bent and pulled it up. As they passed into the green light, she examined the paper. A quarter of the way through, with a wry smile, she passed it to Bron.
So as not to look at her, he read it:
THESE THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN YOUR CITY!!!
the broadside proclaimed in askew, headline letters.
Smaller letters beneath announced:
“Here are Thirteen Things your government does not want you to know.”
Beneath that were a list of numbered paragraphs:
1) The gravity cut that threw a blanket of terror over the entire Tethys Keep last night is not the first to rock the city. A three-sheet area in the unlicensed sector near the outer ring, that included the C and D wings of the Para-med Hospital Wards, was hit by a two-and-a-half minute, total gravity failure, which, while it caused only a half-pound drop in atmosphere pressure because the area was comparatively small, produced gale-force winds in the peripheral area of the u-1 whose peak force was never measured, but which, five and three-quarters minutes later, was recorded to have dropped to a hundred and thirty miles an hour! Damage figures still have not been released. There are twenty-nine people known to be dead—among them four of the seven “political” patients (inmates? prisoners?) at the C Annex of the Para-med. We could go into this in more detail, but there are too many other things to list. For example: