“Oh, no ... !” Inside the mask, he felt his face grow moist. “I just meant that you probably wouldn’t—You don’t really think that, do you? Because if you do, you’re just wrong! You’re very wrong!”
“Until Audri stopped me in the hall this morning, all I was thinking was that you’d made Metalogics sound like a fairly interesting subject. And I was rather looking forward to working in the department.”
“Well, thank you—” Without straining preposterously back, he could not see above her dark, delicate collarbone. “I’m glad at least I—”
“What it comes down to is: Is there any chance you might change your mind and keep me on?”
A surge of embarrassment and annoyance closed out all sympathy. He took his gloved hands from the desk and put them on his thighs, let them drop from his thighs, so that the voluminous double sleeves fell down about his wrists. Should he? Could he let her intimidate him like this? “No.” He took a breath, let it out. “I’m afraid I can’t.” He raised his head high enough to see her chin: it was moving a little oddly. “You can’t run a department that way. I’m sorry about the job, but—well, anything I say would just be silly at this point. My reasons have to do with a lot of things, which, since you aren’t in this department now, aren’t your concern. We have the Day Star program to rework where, yes, I could possibly use you. But I’ve just finished going over it again not ten minutes ago, and for all sorts of reasons, having to do with equally important projects, I just don’t want to do it now. It’s very simple and very straightforward: I just don’t need you, right now, for the jobs I have to do.” He took another breath and felt, to his surprise, somewhat relieved by his explanation. “Actually, I’m glad you came to see me. Because I wouldn’t have wanted you to leave thinking it was something personal.” Hoping he would never again have to set eyes on her, even so much of her as he could see now, he said: “Maybe we’ll run into one another at your co-op; someday we may even be able to have a drink and a laugh over it.”
“You said I should be honest,” came from somewhere above her shoulders. “Frankly, I hope I don’t see you or anyone else from this lame-brained funhouse for a good, long time. And that, I’m afraid, is completely personal!”
Bron’s jaw clamped. His mask slipped so that he could not see above her broad, chromium-cinched hips: they turned (not sharply, not angrily, but slowly and, if hips could look tired by themselves, tiredly) in the doorway, moved off into the corridor.
His cheeks were warm. He blinked, growing furious with the discomfort. While he’d been talking to her, he’d been trying to recall exactly why he’d wanted her gone. But she’d thrown him off with that incredible suggestion that it was because she hadn’t responded to his advances! Sometime yesterday—and, yes, it was before the Spike had related that stupid and insulting crack about his being a louse—he’d come to the decision. And, as a decision made, he’d stored it. Coming into the office that morning, in a swirl of black, he had gone straight to Audri’s office and laid it out.
Audri had said: “Oh ... well, all right.”
He’d gone to his own cubicle, gone to work; and had been feeling rather good until minutes ago ... It had been a logical decision. Still, for the life of him, he could not reconstruct the logic, or metalogic, that had generated it.
He thought: If you reach a conclusion validly, you don’t store all the work notes and doodles you’ve amassed on the way. Those are just the things conclusions are there to dispense with! (He crumpled a piece of paper that, looking at its gray, graphed corner sticking from the black-gloved knot, he realized he probably would need again.) She doesn’t like me and I don’t like her. You can’t work in an atmosphere like that. That’s logical!
He put the graphpaper down, pulled off one glove and, with a plastic graph template, began to clean his thumbnail. A bad adolescent nail-biter, he had, at the advent of his ephebic profession, finally broken the habit. But all his nails were now wider edge-to-edge than from cuticle to crown; which still looked a little odd. He didn’t like his hands and, with certain drugs, avoided looking at them at all. Well, today at least, his nails were filed, lacquered, and of even length.
For practical purposes, they looked ordinary enough.
He put the glove back on, pulled his cloak around his left shoulder, then his right and, at last able to use both hands, adjusted the head-mask.
His cheeks were still warm. On both, he knew, would be mottled, red blotches, just beginning to fade.
In the cafeteria, he was sitting at a just-plain-eating booth, pinching at the folds of a half-collapsed coffee bulb, when, glancing up, he saw Audri with her tray. “Hi, there,” she said and slid in across from him. “Ah ... !” She put her head, half masked on the left (clean and bright as a silver egg with an eye), against the padded back. “This has been a day!”
Bron grunted.
“My feelings exactly!” Silver covered the left side of Audri’s neck, her shoulder, one breast, down (below the tabletop now) over one hip, in a tight plastic skin that would have been quite svelte on anyone with less corners than Audri.
Bron reached up, lifted off his head covering, placed it on the wooden (an artificial cellular fiber indistinguishable from wood on any but micro graphic level) table, and looked at the puddle of dark veils, the shaded eye-holes, the black sequins that damasked the whole basketball-like affair. “Sorry about that transfer this morning. I hope she didn’t give you as much trouble about it as she gave me.”
Audri shrugged. “Yeah ... well, you know—I told her you weren’t the type to change your mind about something like that. It has happened before. She sighed, picked up something long and dark and sprinkled with nuts, looked at it disapprovingly. “She said that there might be extenuating circumstances, though, and she wanted to talk to you. I tried to suggest as politely as possible that she might as well not bother. But, finally, I couldn’t very well say no. I felt sorry for her, you know? She’s been shuttled all over the whole hegemony and it really wasn’t her fault. It’s just the general confusion.”
Bron grunted again. “I didn’t know this would be her last chance. It never occurred to me she was going to be out of a job entirely.”
Audri grunted back. “That’s why I asked you to see if you couldn’t do something with her when I brought her in.”
“Oh. Well, yeah ...” Had Audri made some special request of him about the girl? Bron frowned. He certainly didn’t remember it.
Audri sighed. “I held the green slip back until she’d come from talking with you about it—”
Bron looked up from the crumpled bulb. “You mean it wasn’t final?” He let the frown deepen. “I’d thought the whole thing was already a closed matter ... If I’d known that, maybe I would have ...” No, he wasn’t really lying. It hadn’t occurred to him that the slip had not been sent. “She should have told me.”
“Well—” Audri took a bite of the nut bar—“it’s sent now. Besides, everything’s so messed up right through here anyway with the situation between us and the worlds, I’m surprised we’re still here at all. Our accounts are all over the moons—even Luna. And what’s going to happen there? Everybody knows that they’re going to be a lot of people out of work soon, and nobody knows who. Who even knows what you and I’ll be doing in six months ...” She nodded knowingly. Then said: “Don’t worry, I’m not threatening you.”
“No, I didn’t think you were.” He smiled. “You’re not the threatening type.”
“True,” Audri said. “I’m not.”
“Hey,” Philip said above him, “when are we going to see some work on Day Star, huh? Audri sent you an assistant yesterday and you send her back today. Move over—”
“Hey, come on—!” Bron said.
Philip’s tray clattered down next to Audri’s. “Don’t worry, I don’t even want to sit next to you.” Philip, today in tight pants, bare-chested (very hairy), and small, gray, shoulder cape, fell into the seat next to Audri. “Has this ever been a day—! Hurry up and wait; wait because I’m in a hurry.” He frowned through his curly beard. “What was wrong with her?”