He let out his breath, sat back on the air-filled pad, considered it again now that it was gone, and thought:
I can’t have that crazed lesbian in my office. Look how she makes me feel even knowing she lives in the same co-op with her! Bron (like most people) thought of jealousy as an irrational emotion. But it was also a real one. And he felt it infrequently enough to respect it when he did. I’ll ask Audri (or Philip? No, Audri) to get her transferred to another department ... She catches on quick and I could use someone with a brain to get that Day Star-minus nonsense into shape. But that’s not the point, he decided. A transfer. Yes. I’ll—
“Hello!” a familiar voice said, directly above him.
He looked up. Inset in the ceiling was a speaker. “Eh ... hello?”
“I’m on my way—”
“You don’t have to rush for—” but, hearing clicks, he looked down as the bright orange door finished rolling into the dull orange wall.
“Oh ...”
“Hi, there!” She walked into the room. “What a surprise.” Loose, red pants flapped at her bare ankles. From her waist, black suspenders crossed between her breasts (there brass clips hooked a large, red, plastic R ... he had no idea why) and went up over her shoulders. She stopped with her hands against her thighs, nails clean of gold now, slightly dirty and endearing, lips unrouged and charming. “You could have knocked me over with an eyelash when Miriamne told me you were here—I was all set to spend the evening going over forty-six micro-scenarios that I know, without looking, are not our kind of thing at all. People keep giving us things that are minute-long gimmicks, instead of minute-long theater ... you know what I mean? That’s why we end up creating most of our own works. But I always feel I have to consider unsolicited material, anyway, just in case. My mistake was telling the endowment people I would devote a certain amount of energy to it. Some weeks you just feel less like considering them than others. And this is one of them.” She sat down on the bed beside him—“We’ve been rehearsing a new piece all afternoon that goes into production tomorrow. We just broke off half an hour ago—” and placed her hand affectionately on his leg, little and ring fingers together, middle and forefingers together, with a V between, which on Earth, and the Moon, and Mars, and Io, and Europa, and Ganymede, and Callisto, and Iapetus, and Galileo, and Neriad, and Triton, in co-op and commune, park, bar, public walk and private soiree, was the socially acceptable way for men, women, children, and several of the genetically engineered higher animals to indicate: I am sexually interested.
“Would you like to come back to my room?” she asked.
For the third time that day his heart started to thud. “Urn ...” he said. “I mean ... yeah. I mean, if you ... sure. Yeah. Please ...”
She clapped her knees.
He almost grabbed her hand back.
“Come on, let’s go.” She stood up, smiling. “I share the room with Windy—our acrobat. And Charo—that’s our guitar player. It probably wouldn’t bother you, their being there. But it would me—I’m a bit peculiar. I asked them to brave the steely-eyed glances of the commons room for a couple of hours. These single-sex unspecified-preference co-ops are like living on top of an iceberg!”
“Yeah,” he said, following her through the orange doorway, through halls, down staircases, along corridors. “I live in one too.”
“I mean,” she said, stopping by a room door, and glancing back at him, “it’s awfully nice of Three Fires to take us in at all—the company’s got men and women in it, of all persuasions. But wow! The psychic chill!” And then: “You do? Well!” She pressed her thumb against the circular I.D. plate on the door (which seemed as quaint as the books in the visitors’ lounge). “I mean—” she said, in a tone that told him she was politely picking up another thread of thought—“if Windy and Charo just sat around and read, I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad. But they’re always practicing. Both of them. I just find it distracting.”
The door opened.
She stepped in.
He followed.
The bed was triple-sized and rumpled.
“Really, when Miriamne told me that you were her boss ...”
He laughed, completely delighted. “What did she say about me?”
She glanced back at him, considered—with her tongue a small knob in her cheek: “That you tried hard.” She turned before the bed, unsnapped a suspender that flopped down against the red pants. “I took it as a recommendation.”
Stepping toward her, he wondered fleetingly if something terrible might happen.
It didn’t.
They made love.
Afterward, she made lazy suggestions about getting back to her scripts. But, with one thing and another, they made love again—after which, to his astonishment, he broke out crying. Tears still brimming, he tried to laugh them away, ultimately rather proud of himself for the openness of his emotions—whatever the hell they were ... Obviously moved, she cradled his head in her lap, and asked, “What is it? There, there, what’s the matter?”
Still laughing, still crying, he said: “I don’t know. I really don’t. This doesn’t happen to me very often. Really.” It had happened to him exactly twice before, both times when he was twenty, both times with short, dark, small-boned, broad-hipped women at least fifteen years older than he was.
They made love again.
“You know,” she said at last, stretching in his arms, “You really are quite lovely. Where—” and one arm went out over the side of the bed—“did you learn to do that?”
Bron turned over on his stomach (quite recovered from his crying jag) smiling: “I told you once, actually. But you’ve probably forgotten.”
“Mmmm?” She glanced at him.
“Now you’re probably the type to hold it against me,” he said, not believing it a moment. These wholesome Outer Satelliters were desperately accepting of any World-bound decadence; it supplied some sort of frisson, he suspected, ordinarily missing from their small-world lives.
“Dear heart—” she rolled against him—“everyone’s a type.”
Raising his eyebrow, Bron looked down at the hollow between her neck’s ligaments. “From the age of ... well, on and off between the ages of eighteen and—oh, about twenty-three, my sexual services could be purchased at a place in Bellona called—I kid you not—the Flesh Pit.”
“By who?” She cocked her head. “Women?”
“Yes. Women—Oh, it was a fine, upstanding, highly-taxed, government-approved job.”
“Taxes,” she said. “Yes. I’ve heard worlds are like that—” Suddenly she threw an arm over his shoulder. “What was it like? I mean, did you sit in a cage and get selected by prowling creatures with dilated pupils, silver eyelids, and cutaway veils?”
“Not quite.” Bron laughed. “Oh, we got a few of the cutaway-veil set. But they’re pretty much restricted to old movies and ancient Annie-shows. Not all, though—my gold eyebrow used to really turn some of them on. But then, they knew what it meant.
“What does it mean?”
“Nothing pleasant. Come on. Give us a snuggle.”
She snuggled. “Living on a world always sounded so romantic to me. I grew up on the Gannymede icefields. I’m practically a provincial bumpkin compared to you. Was it awful—being a prostitute and paying taxes and things? Awful to your psyche, I mean?”
“No ... Sexually, at any rate, after a couple of A-seventy-nine forms, you just got a pretty good idea of who you really were.”
“Did you have to go with any woman who would pay?”
He began to suspect the idea turned her on and considered beginning an erotic monologue he had actually employed with various women out here that (actually) contained only a few fantasies of omission: it ended with his being mauled by a dozen women in a locked room, where he’d been unwittingly lured, and leaving bruised, exhausted, drained; it could usually be count—
ed on to incite more lovemaking. But he was curious about her curiosity. “For all practical purposes I did. But the Pit was there for its customers, so they were pretty efficient about the guys they hired. When you apply for a job like that the first time ... well, you fill out a lot of performance forms, take a lot of response tests and what have you. I mean, it wouldn’t really do to send a woman to a guy who just couldn’t get it up for her—assuming that’s what she was into; and a good quarter of the clients weren’t, really.”