2) We have a copy of a memo from the Liaison Department between the Diplomatic Department and Intelligence, with a 4:00 P. A. issue circulation stamp, that reads, in part: “... The crisis tonight will be brief. Most citizens will not even notice—
“Excuse me,” a hoarse voice said. “You better let me have that, sir.”
Bron looked up in the green light.
Miriamne had stopped too.
“You might as well hand it over ... sir.” The man was burly. Grizzled hair (and one diminutive nipple)
pushed through the black web across his chest. He wore a black skullcap, black pants, shoes open in the front over hairy, hammered toes. (They would be open in the back too, Bron knew, over wide, horny heels.) He held a canvas sack in one hand (that arm was sleeved in black), and in the other (bare except for a complicated, black gauntlet, a-glitter with dials, knobs, small cases, and finned projections) he clutched crumpled flyers. “Some bunch in the u-1 printed up about fifteen thousand of these and dumped a batch at every goddamn exit. So all the e-girls have to go and turn pollution controllers!” He looked at Miriamne, who, with folded arms, now leaned one shoulder against the green tiles. Her sullen, preoccupied look had gone; it had been replaced by one of muted, but clear, hostility. “I mean you can’t have junk like this just blowing around in the streets.” His eyes came back to Bron’s. “So come on, let a girl do his job and hand it ...” His expression faltered. “Look, if you want to read it, just put it in your pocket and take it with you. There’s no restriction on having as many of ’em as you want in your own room—but we’re supposed to get ’em cleaned up off all publicly licensed property. Look, / don’t care if you read it. Just don’t leave it around in your commons, that’s all ... this isn’t some goddamn police state. Where do you think we are, Earth? / come from Earth. I used to be an enforcement-girl—well, we called ’em enforcement-boys, there—in Pittsburgh, before I came out here and got on the force. In Pittsburgh you could get hauled off for resocialization just for something like that—” He nodded toward the tiled wall where Miriamne was leaning. Someone had painted across it in day-glo red (which looked thoroughly unappetizing under the green light-strips):
PLANT YOUR FEET ON IT FIRMLY! THIS ONE AIN’T GREEN CHEESE!
Below it clumsy arrows pointed to the ground. (In black chalk, someone had scrawled across one side of the slogan: “that’s a bit difficult if they keep cutting the gravity” with several black arrows pointing toward the last, day-glo exclamation point.)
“Believe me, in Pittsburgh, that’s just how they do.” (Enforcement-agents at Tethys had, fifteen years ago, been almost all women, hence the “e-girl” nickname. With changing standards, and the migrations of the recent decade and a half, by now the force was almost a third male. But the name persisted, and, as Chief Enforcement Officer Phyllis Freddy had once explained on a public-channel culture survey to a smiling interviewer, and thereby cooled the last humor out of a joke that had never been more than tepid: “Look, an e-girl is a girl, I don’t care if she’s a man or a woman!”) “Really. I mean, I know what I’m talking about. Now put it away or give it here, huh?”
Bron glanced at Miriamne again (who was watching quietly), then handed over the flyer.
It followed the others into the sack.
‘Thanks.” The black-clad agent pushed the papers down further. “I mean, you come out here to the moons and you take a job as a girl because it’s what you know how to do, it’s what you’ve been trained for—and believe me, it’s a lot easier here than it is in Pittsburgh ... or Nangking. I know ’cause I’ve worked in both—I mean you take the job because you want to be a girl—” He stepped by Bron, bent down, and swept up another handful from the papers fluttering along the ground—“and what do you end up? A garbage man!”
Miriamne started walking again, arms still folded. Bron walked too.
Blowing paper (and papers crumpled and crushed) echoed in the underpass.
On the dark walk, beside the rail, Miriamne turned left.
Right, bright, melding colors caught Bron’s eye:
An ego-booster stood by the gritty wall some dozen feet down. Something was wrong with it.
“Excuse me,” Bron called. “Can you wait up a moment?”
He walked toward it.
Someone had defaced it—probably with the same aerosol spray that the “green cheese” slogan had been written with on the underpass tiles. Against the normally melting hues, it was hard to tell which was booth and which was defacement; the only thing that made him sure was the legend above the entrance (only “your” and half of “society” showed), splotched out with red splatter.
The canvas had been yanked loose from its runners at one end; he pushed it back.
Inside was streaked scarlet. Had some religious cult-ist chosen this booth in which to perform self-mutilation—?
It was only vandalism.
The screen was caved, the red too bright for blood. The token slot was plastered over with half-chewed Protyyn, or worse. The lips of the card slip were pried.
“I guess,” Bron mused, “last night just made people a little more annoyed about these things ...”
Miriamne, somewhere just behind his shoulder, said, “That’s been like that four months. You just noticed it?” Then she said: “Look, I don’t mean to be impolite. But one reason I wanted to leave a few minutes early is that I’d like to try and catch a friend of mine at the co-op—it’s rather important to me.” She smiled. “An affair of the heart, if you will ... ? If you don’t mind, I’ll just go on—”
“No—” Bron said, turning. “I mean, I don’t mind. But I—”
Miriamne had already started walking.
Bron caught up. “I mean, I thought I might stop by and see if Spike—the Spike was there. I’d wanted to ... well, tell her how much I liked her theater piece—unless of course they’re out somewhere performing ... ?”
“No,” Miriamne said. “Not tonight. They may be rehearsing though.” She uncrossed her arms, hooked one chrome-nailed thumb on her chrome waist-cinch. “From a couple of things she said, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was rather glad to see you,” which, as he hurried on (sometimes silently beside her, sometimes silently behind), made him bubblingly happy.
Dark streets, here and there slashed by a sodium light-tube set upright in a wall-holder (the bottom few inches of most of them were completely grimed over), gave way to narrower alleys. The glowing red coordinate numbers and letters, in their little frames above him, by now had so many superscripts and subscripts you’d really need a wrist calculator to figure out exactly where you were.
They went up some ringing metal steps between two walls maybe twenty inches apart, into a tunnel that was dead black, cool, damp, and whose roof (Bron knew it was filthy) kept brushing his hair.
“This way—” Miriamne said, muffled by dark walls—“I know I’m taking you by a pretty grim shortcut. But I’m in a hurry.”
He went ‘this way,’ bumped his shoulder on the corner of the turnoff; while he rubbed it, ahead a line of orange light opened beside Miriamne, sweeping her into broad-hipped silhouette.
“In here—” which was a circular room with a single light-pole in the center, floor to ceiling. “This is Three Fires’ visitors’ lounge. I know it’s pretty bare—” Bunk beds against the wall with blue plastic sleeping pads; a few floor cushions; some low shelves, on which were books. (How quaint, he thought. How u-1.) There was a reader beside the bed, but nothing like a file drawer for a library. (Which was also, he reflected, very u-1. The books, of course, would all be poetry.) “We don’t have many visitors,” Miriamne explained. “I’ll go send the Spike down—you’ll excuse me if I don’t come back. But I really do want to catch my friend ... If she’s still here. If the Spike’s not in, someone will come up and tell you. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.” She nodded.
“Thanks.” Bron nodded after her, sitting on the bottom bunk, only now realizing with certainty that “her friend” was not the Spike after all. The orange plastic door, clicking bearings, closed on an image of her rocking waist-cinch, wide hips below and bare flesh above. Behind Bron’s smile, a haze of hostility, with him since they’d entered the underpass, broke up, and drifted away.