Bron stood, naked and confused, on the empty, unlicensed street, where anything, anything could happen.
He stood there quite a while, thinking about what had, looking down at himself, looking up at the clock, or off into the darkness where she’d gone.
Across the tracks, with shuffling steps, came two mumblers. One, eyes tight, head bent, swung a blue plastic bowl. She led the other, a much older man, by the hand: his eyes were bound with rag.
Their voices, dull and fluttery, wound and twisted, apart and together. The woman’s mantra was a lengthy one, of interlocking say able and unsay able sounds. The man’s, on a single note, in a rasping voice ... Bron had to hear it through five times before he would let himself be sure: and, by then, they had nearly reached the opposite alleyway; and the woman’s voice kept obscuring it, here at the third syllable, there at the seventeenth:
“Mimimomomizolalilamialomuelamironoriminos ...”
Alfred’s fingernails (and toenails) were long and dirty. So was Alfred’s hair. He leaned forward from the conversation chair, a red plastic K clipped with brass to the black suspenders (What in the world ... ? Bron wondered: What in two worlds and twenty worldlets could they stand for?) hung loosely on his bony chest. “I just don’t know, I really don’t.” Alfred shook his head, his voice low, raspy, and intense. “I don’t know ....” The suspenders held up scarlet bikini briefs, ludicrously too large for Alfred’s bony hips—but in the type of places Alfred probably frequented, that was, probably, the point. “In a week, I pick up two, three, four women and it’s fine. Then, the next night—I’m horny as hell and the woman I get is a real knockout. But we come back here ... and I’ve got the limps! Can’t raise it no way! And that goes on for sometimes, three, four, five weeks, till I can’t even do anything with it by myself, you know? And I’m still getting women and they’re just being as cooperative as hell! Which makes it worse. Then, finally, when I start to get it back together, and score with another one, and get her to come back here ... and this always happens with the one you really want and you really had to work your tail off to get—we get goin’ and—Pow!” Alfred bounced nearly to his feet, then sagged back in the chair. He shook his head. “Three seconds, four seconds ... maybe ten! If I’m lucky!” He blinked green eyes at Bron. “Then I gotta go through a week of that, before I can get it on for a decent two or three minutes, over the next couple of times. I mean, that’s why I live here, you know? I bring a woman back here, if I mess up I can say, Thanks for comin’ by, ma’am. Sorry I wasted your time. See you around,’ and get her out of here! Those mixed co-ops, where the guys and girls live together, makin’ it with each other all the time—? I tried six of those when I first got here (and they had some nice women there ... Wow!); you mess up more’n a couple of times there and the first thing you know they want to talk about it! And then you got to talk about it some more. The next thing you know, you have to have a damn encounter with all the other men and women who messed up that week—When / mess, I don’t wanna talk. I wanna go to sleep! If I talked about every time I messed up with some woman I wouldn’t have time to pee! And that’s another thing—you ever try to pee in the sink with some woman you just messed up with lying in the bed staring at you? I mean, even if she ain’t looking!” Alfred sat forward again, leaned on his knees, shook his head. “I just about given up. On peeing, I mean.” The green eyes came up again. “Hey. I ordered this ointment from one of those shops down at the Plaza of Light, one that sells them magazines—?” Alfred leaned closer, his tone suddenly confidential. “I checked it out with the computer and it said there wasn’t anything wrong with using it ... It’s credited to me already. But they said they don’t get much call for it so they don’t keep it in stock. They’re gonna have it in tomorrow—only tomorrow I have to start these vocational aptitude tests. My social worker says I have to—You pick it up for me, Bron. The shop’s on the southeast corner—not the big one. The little one, two doors to the left.” Alfred paused, blinked. “You pick it up for me, Bron ... okay?”
“Okay.” Bron nodded, smiled, and felt put upon.
Alfred had emigrated from some minor moon (Uranus’s—but then, which of Uranus’s weren’t minor; not one of the five was over 900 k’s in diameter) as a fourteen-year-old orphan; and didn’t like to talk about his past, either. (Even this much information had come to Bron via Lawrence.) Bron figured that emigrating at fourteen took about ten year’s more guts than emigrating at twenty-four, even if it was within the Satellite Federation. Hell, three years ago the situation had been so tense only Ganymede and Triton were accepting emigrants from Earth and Mars both. Triton only took them from Mars. “Alfred, has it ever occurred to you that you might be gay?” He asked because he felt he had to say something. “I mean, emotionally.” (Alfred, having gotten his favor, would sit silent the next hour if given his head.) Also, bits of the Spike’s conversation kept returning to him. “What I’d do if I had problems like that is check out a refixation clinic. Get your thing switched over to men and see if it all falls into place.”
“No,” Alfred said, shaking his head. “No____” But both the no’s and the headshake were despair rather than negation. “No ... I mean, I did that, once, you know? I mean that’s what my social worker said, too. They fixed it up for me. At a clinic in the u-1. For six months I tried it.”
“And?”
“It was awful. I mean I was horny for men all right. But as far as how it went when I got ’em in the sack, I mean it was just the same thing—up, down, in, out, and, ‘What, you’re finished already?’—only with complications—I mean, if they go in and you finish up in three seconds, then it hurts, you know? So you gotta ask them to take it out, and they still wanna go, and nobody likes that!”
“Mmmmm,” Bron said, because he couldn’t think of anything else.
“Finally, I just went back to the clinic and said, hey, please, would you put it back together the way it was before? Let me at least like what I like liking—you know?—whether I mess up or not. I mean—” Alfred sat back—“they’re supposed to be very common prob—
lems. It’s not like they were rare or anything.” Alfred frowned. “I mean it’s not like I’m the only person who ever had problems like that—you’d think they could do something for a guy.” He sat back a bit more. “Did you ever have problems like that?”
“Well ...” Bron considered. Two of his first three (major) sexual experiences (all within the month before his fourteenth birthday) might, with definition stretched, have been said to have involved premature orgasm, i.e., the orgasms had surprised him. But not since. What problems he now had (if they were problems) veered in the other direction: and even those merely tended to herald a recurrent (and blessedly mild) prostate infection that had popped up every year or so since he was thirty. “If you’re making it every other night,” Bron offered, “you can’t expect it to go perfect every time.” During his first professional years, when, at two, three, and often four a day, he had actually balled (the first time he’d calculated it, the number had taken him aback, too) eight hundred or more women, he’d been attacked by the ‘limps’ somewhat under a dozen times; since then, the frequency had gone substantially down. The only way he could conceive of Alfred’s problems was to assume that it was tantamount to being, basically, asexual. He was sure Alfred enjoyed roaming in the many meeting places with their loud music, their low lights, enjoyed being eyed by women, being engaged in conversation by them (or perhaps Alfred did the engaging. Bron knew he tended to project his most common experiences—rather than his preferences—on everybody), even enjoyed bringing them back to his eccentric address (“An all male co-op ... ? And you mean it isn’t gay?”). Perhaps Alfred even enjoyed ordering out-of-stock ointments at tiny shops. Sex, however (Bron was convinced), Alfred could not possibly enjoy. “Give it some time,” Bron said. “And, well ... I mean, when I was your age ...” But Alfred was seventeen. And Bron was a politic enough thirty-seven to know no seventeen-year-old (especially a seventeen-year-old who had elected to live so completely away from his peers as Alfred) wanted to be reminded of it.