The sensory shield (“It merely shields us from the reality of night;” again, Lawrence) flowed overhead, translating into visible light the radio-sky behind it.
Neptune (as was explained on various tourist posters frequently and, infrequently, in various flimsies and fiche-journals) would not be that intense a turquoise, even on the translation scale; but it was a nice color to have so much of up there.
Night?
Neriad? From Triton, the other moon of Neptune never looked larger than a star. Once he’d read, in a book with old, bright pictures, “... Neriad has a practically sausage-shaped orbit ...” He knew the small moon’s hugely oblate circuit, but had frequently wondered just what a sausage was.
He smiled at the pink pavement. (The frown still hung inside, worrying at muscles which had already set their expression for the crowd; there was no crowd ...) At the corner, he turned toward the unlicensed sector.
It was not the direct way home; but, from time to time, since it was another thing his sort didn’t do, he would wander a few blocks out of his way to amble home through the u-1.
^ At founding, each Outer Satellite city had set aside a city sector where no law officially held—since, as the Mars sociologist who first advocated it had pointed out, most cities develop, of necessity, such a neighborhood anyway. These sectors fulfilled a complex range of functions in the cities’ psychological, political, and economic ecology. Problems a few conservative, Earth-bound thinkers feared must come, didn’t: the interface between official law and official lawlessness produced some remarkably stable unofficial laws throughout the no-law sector. Minor criminals were not likely to retreat there: enforcement agents could enter the u-1 sector as could anyone else; and in the u-1 there were no legal curbs on apprehension methods, use of weapons, or technological battery. Those major criminals whose crimes—through the contractual freedom of the place—existed mainly on paper found it convenient, while there, to keep life on the streets fairly safe and minor crimes at a minimum. Today it was something of a truism: “Most places in the unlicensed sector are statistically safer than the rest of the city.” To which the truistic response was: “But not all.’9
Still, there was a definite and different feel to the u-1 streets. Those who chose to live there—and many did—did so because, presumably, they liked that feel.
And those who chose only to walk? (Bron saw the arched underpass in the gray wall across the alley’s end.)—those who chose to walk there only occasionally, when they felt their identity threatened by the redundant formality of the orderly, licensed world ... ? Lawrence was probably right: They were a type too.
The wall right of the arch was blank and high. In their frame, green numbers and letters for the alley’s coordinates glowed. Forty or fifty stories up, windows scattered irregularly. Level with him, someone had painted a slogan; someone else had painted it out. Still, the out-painting followed the letters enough to see it must have been seven ... eight ... ten words long: and the seventh was, probably, earth.
The wall to the left was scaly with war posters. “Triton with the Satellite Alliance!” was the most frequent, fragmented injunction. Three, pretty much unmarred, demanded: “What on EARTH have WE got to worry about!?!” And another: “Keep Triton Up and Out!” That one should be peeled down pretty soon, by whoever concerned themselves with poster peeling; as, from the scraps and shreds a-dangle, somebody must.
The underpass was lit either side with cadaverous green light-strips. Bron entered. Those afraid of the u-1 gave their claustrophobic fear of violence here (since statistics said you just wouldn’t find it inside) as their excuse.
His reflection shimmered, greenly, along the tiles.
Asphalt ground, grittily, under his sandals.
An air convection suddenly stung his eyes and tossed paper bits (shreds from more posters) back along the passage.
A-squint in the dying breeze, he came out in near darkness. The sensory shield was masked here, in this oldest sector of the city. Braces of lights on high posts made the black ceiling blacker still. Snaking tracks converged in gleaming clutches near a lightpost base, then wormed into shadow.
A truck chunkered, a hundred yards away. Three people, shoulder to shoulder, crossed an overpass. Bron turned along the plated walkway. A few cinders scattered near the rail. He thought: Here anything may happen; and the only thing my apprehensiveness assures is that very little will ...
The footsteps behind only punctured his hearing when a second set, heavier and duller, joined them.
He glanced back—because you were supposed to be more suspicious in the u-1.
A woman in dark slacks and boots, with gold nails and eyes and a short cape that did not cover her breasts, was hurrying after him. Perhaps twenty feet away, she waved at him, hurried faster—
Behind her, lumbering up into the circle of light from the walkway lamp, was a gorilla of a man.
He was filthy.
He was naked, except for fur strips bound around one muscular arm and one stocky thigh; chains swung from his neck before a furry, sunken chest. His hair was too fouled and matted to tell if it was dyed blue or green.
The woman was only six feet off when the man—she hadn’t realized he was behind her ... ?—overtook her, spun her back by the shoulder and socked her in the jaw. She clutched her face, staggered into the rail and, mostly to avoid the next blow that glanced off her ear, pitched to her knees, catching herself on her hands.
A-straddle her, the man bellowed, “You leave him—” jabbing at Bron with three, thick fingers, each with a black, metal ring—“alone, you hear? You just leave him alone, sister! Okay, brother—” which apparently meant Bron, though the man didn’t really look away from the top of the woman’s blonde head—“she won’t bother you any more.”
Bron said: “But she wasn’t—”
The matted hair swung. His face glowered: the flesh high and to the left of his nose was so scarred, swollen, and dirty, Bron could not tell if the sunken spot glistening within was an eye or open wound. The head shook slowly. “Okay, brother. I did my part. You’re on your own, now ...” Suddenly the man turned and lumbered away, bare feet thudding through the circle of light on the cindery plates.
The woman sat back on the walkway, rubbing her chin.
Bron thought: Sexual encounters are more frequent in the u-1. (Was the man part of some crazed, puritan sect?)
The woman scowled at Bron; then her eyes, scrunching tighter, moved away.
Bron asked: “I’m terribly sorry—but are you into prostitution?”
She looked at him again, sharply, started to say one thing, changed to another, finally settled on, “Oh, Jesus Christ,” then went back to fingering her jaw.
Bron thought: The Christians aren’t making another comeback ... ? He asked: “Well, are you all right?”
She shook her head in a way that did not, he decided, mean specifically negation. (As her exclamation, he decided, did not specifically mean Christianity.) She stuck out a hand.
He looked at it a moment (it was a hand wide as his own, with pronounced ligaments, the skin around the gold nails rough as some craftsman’s): she wanted help up.
He tugged her to her feet, noting as she came, unsteadily, erect that she was generally big-boned and rather awkward. Most people with frames like that—like himself—tended to cultivate large muscles (as he had done); she, however—common in people from the low-gravity Holds or the median-gravity Keeps—hadn’t bothered.
She laughed.
He looked up from her hips to find her looking at him, still laughing. Something inside pulled back; she was laughing at him. But not like the craftsman at the mumblers. It was rather as if he had just told her a joke that had given her great pleasure. Wondering what it was, he asked:
“Does it hurt?”
She said, thickly, “Yes,” and nodded, and kept laughing.
“I mean I thought you might be into prostitution,” Bron said. “Rare as it is out here—” which meant the Outer Satellites—“it is more common here—” which meant, die u-1. He wondered if she understood the distinction.
Her laugh ended with a sigh. “No. I’m into history, actually.” She blinked.