“So you could choose just to go to bed with attractive women if you wanted—”
He shook his head, wondering if she were kidding. “Look, if you were the kind of guy who could only get it on with the nubile nymphs on the daytime video romances, really, you just wouldn’t be too likely to apply for the job. When I got hired, I was down for all women with physical deformities. For some reason, a scar or a withered arm or leg always gets me off; which made me quite useful. And older women, of course; and dark skin; and big hips; I was also down for what they called second-level sadism.”
“My Lord,” she said. “What’s that? No, don’t tell me! Did women prostitutes get the same, deluxe treatment—performance forms and the like?”
“Female prostitution is illegal on Mars—oh, of course there was a lot of it around. Probably as much of it as there was the male kind, just in numbers. But because it was pretty harried by the e-girls ... eh, e-men, if any single-establishment got near the size of one of the male houses, it was raided, broken up, and closed down. So you just couldn’t get things quite to the same level of organization. But I got special credit exemptions and preferred ratings on standard government loans for each uninterrupted six-months period I worked—of which, incidentally, in three and a half years there were only two. It’s the kind of job you take vacations from a lot.” He put his hand on the back of her neck, rubbed. “Now, on Earth, female prostitution is government-licensed in most places and male prostitution is illegal. The oddest thing: some of the big men that ran the Flesh Pit—and about half the other houses in the Goebels—went to Earth and set up Earth-licensed houses of female prostitution in various cities there, using the same techniques they’d developed on Mars for the male houses—screening the prostitutes, getting their performance charts and preferences. Apparently, they’ve cleaned up! Earth’s oldest profession was also one of its most shoddily run, until they came along—or so they tell you on Mars. I worked with a couple of guys who’d free-lanced various places on Earth, illegally.” He sighed. “They had some peculiar stories.”
“Worlds must be very peculiar places.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t really the only reason we’re at war with them.”
“Or about to be at war with them. Triton, anyway.”
The Spike’s head came up. Her hair feathered the edge of his hand. “Small dark women with big hips and withered arms—” She glanced at him. “Someday you must tell me what you see in a big-boned, scrawny blonde like me.”
“They’re mutually inclusive areas, not mutually exclusive. And they include quite a bit more ...” He nuzzled her shoulder and wondered much the same thing she’d just asked; his mind, used to such meander-ings, had only been able to come up with a sort of generalized incest, or even narcissism, the denial of which was the reason for those other tastes, now (interestingly), broken through.
“Of course,” the Spike said, “the whole thing sounds terribly bizarre, being a prostitute and all.” She looked at him again. “What did your parents think?”
He shrugged; she had broached an uncomfortable area; but he’d always thought honesty a good thing in matters of sex: “I never talked about it with them, really. They were both civic constructionist computer operators—light laborers to you folks out here. They were pretty glum about everything, and I guess that would have only been something else for them to be glum about.”
“My parents—” she said, yawning, “all nine of them—are Ganymede ice-farmers. No cities for them. They’re good people, you know? But they can’t see further than the next methane thaw. Now they’d be quite happy if I’d gone into commiters, like you—or Miriamne. But the theater, I’m afraid, is a little beyond them. It’s not they disapprove, you know ... it’s just ...” She shook her head.
“My parents—and they were only the two—didn’t disapprove. We just didn’t discuss it. That’s all. But then, we didn’t discuss much of anything.”
She was still shaking her head. “Ice-sleds, checking vacuum seals on this piece of equipment, that piece, always looking at the world through polarized blinkers—good solid people. But ... I don’t know: limited.”
Bron nodded, to end, rather than continue. These u-1 folk would talk about their pasts, and, more unsettling, nudge you to talk. (The archetypal scene: The ice-farm Matriarch saying to the young Earth man with the dubious past [or Patriarch saying to the equally dubious young Mars woman]: “We don’t care about what you done, just what you do—and even that, once you done it, we forget it.”) In the licensed area of the city, this philosophy seemed—within reason—to hold. But then, what was the u-1 for, if not to do things differently in? “Now you see,” Bron said, “that seems romantic to me, growing up in the untamed, crystalline wilderness. I used to go to every ice-opera they’d run at the New Omoinoia; and when they’d rerun them on the public channels, a year or so later, I kept an awful lot of clients waiting downstairs while I found out how Bo Ninepins was going to get the settlers out from under another methane slide.”
“Ha!” She flung herself on the bed. “You did? So did my folks. They loved them! You’ve probably seen part of our farm—the ice-opera companies were always using our south acres to do location shooting. It was the only farm within six hundred miles of G-city that had any place on it that looked like it could have been in an ice-opera! Maybe hanging around the shooting company was where I got my first prod toward the theater—who knows? Anyway, we must have burrowed down to the Diamond Palace once a month from the time I was twelve, the whole lot of us. Like going to a religious meeting, I swear. Then they’d stay up till one o’clock in the morning, drinking and complaining about the details that the picture people had gotten wrong this time. And be right there for the next one next month—now that’s what my folks think of as theater: noble old loner Lizzie Ninepins saving the settlers from the slide, or virile young Pick-Ax Pete with his five wives and four husbands carving a fortune out from a methane chasm ...” She laughed. “It was a beautiful landscape to grow up in—at least the south acres was—even if you never saw it without a faceplate between you and the vacuum. Now if I ever directed an ice-opera, my folks would think I’d arrived! Government subsidized micro-theater, indeed! I suppose I’ve had a secret urge to, ever since my name day ... I chose the name of a mother of mine I’d never known, who’d got killed in an ice-slide before I was born.” The Spike laughed. “Now I bet you’ve seen that one in a dozen ice-operas! / certainly had.” (Bron smiled. In the Satellites, children were given only a first name at birth—about half the time the last name of one of their genetic parents, government serial numbers doing for all official identification. Then, at some coming-of-age day, they took a last name for themselves, from the first name of someone famous, or in honor of some adult friend, workmate, or teacher. Naming age was twelve on the moons of Saturn, fourteen on the moons of Jupiter; he wasn’t sure what it was here on Triton, but he suspected it was younger than either. On Earth last names still, by and large, passed down paternally. On Mars, they could pass either paternally or maternally. His father’s last name was Helstrom; if, as by now he was sure was pretty unlikely, he ever joined a family out here, Helstrom would be the [first] name of his first son.) The Spike laughed again, this time muffling the sound in his armpit. Then her head came up. “Do you know what Miriamne really said about you?”
Bron rolled to his side. “She didn’t say I was trying hard?”
“She said that you were a first-class louse but that you were trying hard. She told me this terrible story about how you—” She stopped. Her eyes widened. “Oh dear! I forgot ... you’re her boss—she’s not yours. The last job she had, she was a production fore—