“Yes,” he said, to be shocking: “I’ve taken them once—for a fee.”
And in typical satellite fashion she did not seem to register any shock at all. Well, they were in the u-1, where the shocking was commonplace, weren’t they.
“You only have two decisions to make about a family,” she was going on. “Somewhere around name-day, you decide if you want to have children by accident or by design; if by design—which well over ninety-nine percent do—you get your injection. Then, later, you have to decide that you do want them: and two of you go off and get the pill.”
“I know all that—” he said; and she squeezed his shoulder—to halt him speaking, he realized. “That,” he finished, “at least, is the same as in Bellona.”
“Yes, yes. But I’m just trying to spell the whole thing out to see if I can figure out where you got off the track. With it set up this way, less than twenty percent of the population chooses to reproduce.” (That was not the same as Bellona; but then, Mars was a world, not a moon.) “In a closed-atmosphere city, that’s just under what we can tolerate. In the satellites we try to dissolve that hierarchical bond between children and economic status Earth is so famous for—education, upkeep, and social subsidy—so that you don’t have the horrible situation where if you have no other status, there’s always children. And no matter how well you perform, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’ve got sex confused with. On the one hand, you tell your story in a perfectly coherent way—only I’ve been to parties at family communes in, if not on, the Ring. I’ve been to parties at nonfamily co-ops, where, among forty or fifty adults there were always two or three one-parent families. I’ve been to parties given by adolescent family communes who, for religious reasons, lived in the streets. They’ve all got the same basic education available; and basic food and shelter you can’t be denied credit for at any co-op ,..” She had gone on like this, pulling him closer every time he began to wonder what she was trying to say, till he stopped listening—just tried to feel, instead. They were already at the party by now. One of the first things he did feel was the faint hostility (Windy, who was really a pretty nice guy he decided, and Dian, who by the end of the evening was the nicest person, as far as he was concerned, in the company—with none of the Spike’s brittleness and a gentler way with her equally astute insights—pointed a few subtle examples of it out) between the women who lived at the co-op and the commune who were leaving the next morning. “Though I suppose,” Dian said, leaning arms as hairy as Philip’s on equally hairy knees, “it would try anybody’s patience to have a bunch of strolling players parked in your cellar, carrying on till all hours, while rumors of plague are flying ...” and she nodded toward a modest Triton with the Alliance Now poster on the wall.
He talked to some of the other “audience” who’d been frozen into the last production—various people whom the troupe had performed for, and with whom various members had made friends. Yes, they’d been as surprised by it as Bron had been. From this discussion he looked up to see Miriamne in the room. For ten minutes he desperately wanted to leave, but could think of no way to effect it smoothly. Then, to his em—
barrassment and astonishment, he was asking her, across a conversation group that somehow they’d both become part of, how her job situation was going. She explained, in a friendly enough way, that she was going to work as a transport mechanic at an ice-farm not too far from Tethys. It wasn’t cybralogs, but at least it was working with her hands. He expressed his relief and felt something sink still further inside, something invalidated, something denied.
He turned away to listen to an intense, polysyllabic discussion of the vast difficulty of performing pre-twen-tieth-century theatrical works for a twenty-second-century audience:
“You mean because of the length?”
“There’s that. Primarily, though, it results from the peripitea’s invariably pivoting on sexual jealousy; that’s just so hard for a contemporary audience to relate to.”
“That’s silly,” Bron said. “I get jealous—oh, maybe not specifically sexually. I know you—” to the Spike, who was leaning, affectionately, against him, “and Windy, and that woman who plays the guitar, must have something going. I mean, I’ve seen the bed—”
“He’s even slept in it,” the Spike said, still leaning.
“It would be silly to be jealous of that; but as far as attention goes, I’m as possessive of that in people I’m having a thing with as it’s possible to be ... I guess.”
“So we’ve noticed,” said that woman who played the guitar, with a slightly mocking smile (reminiscent of the Spike’s) that bothered him slightly because, till then, he hadn’t noticed Charo was holding the Spike’s other hand. And somewhere else in the room Windy was laughing.
The Spike had been paying amazing amounts of attention to him, of the silent and unveering sort (Had she been once out of physical contact with him since they’d entered the room ... ?) that made him feel relaxed, secure and, also, practically oblivious to her presence. (The three of them had probably discussed it the previous night and decided he was “that type”—which, though it did not break the relaxed security’s surface, drove the unsettling wedge beneath it deeper.) He wished there was overt reason to dislike the gather—
ing. But there was none of the plastic good will that crusted a gathering at Philip’s, that you wanted to break with a sledge. Parties this side of the license-line were simply going to be more relaxed, more informal, more at ease. There was nothing you could do.
Over the next half hour he mulled over plans of asking her (whom he could just see out of the corner of his eye, but whom he could feel, tucked warmly under his arm) to abandon her life with the commune and come away with him to—what? He did want to do something for her. Finally, he contented himself with evolving a sort of sexual cadenza, a series of caresses, acts, positions, of mounting intensity, to perform with her when they should return to her room—and in a lazy moment when no one was talking to her, he turned to mouth against her ear: “Come ... let me take you.”
“What—?” she murmured.
“Come with me. Follow close. Do what I do ...” and led her into the hall.
The lovemaking was splendid—though only halfway through the list, she implored him to stop. “It’s marvelous,” she whispered. “It’s wonderful. But you’ll kill me!” He had, he realized, let his imagination run away. Minutes later, he too was exhausted. Wrapped around each other, the arms of each straining around each other’s gasped breaths, Bron waited for sleep ... floated up toward it, a bit jerkily (like that inane trapeze, rising into the dark), each gasp.
And still the disappointment—certainly they were both physically satisfied. Was it just that he hadn’t completed his scenario? Was it all some silly, essentially aesthetic flaw, some missed cue, some flubbed entrance, some inessential malfunctioning prop no one in the audience could possibly be aware of? But the audience was only one—And what had she done that he was able to see her less and less clearly, while he thought of her more and more in terms from her work, in words his own tongue had tasted first in her mouth?
He took another breath and was engulfed in sleep, immobilizing as methane ice—and woke from it two hours later, manic with energy, incredibly anxious to leave (he had to get home to change; you couldn’t wear a get-up like this to the office two days in a row), which was all right with her, she was explaining while he pulled on his gloves, put on his mask, pulled the cloak around his shoulders, because she wanted to get ready before—
But he was at the door, wishing her Good Luck on her trip. And she was still in bed, laughing her smooth laugh, and wishing him Good Luck on his.
Bron hurried through the quiet, unlicensed streets.
On the torn, rubber floor-mat of the vandalized booster booth (why had he stopped to look inside it again? He still wasn’t sure) lay pieces of paper. Already knowing what was on their undersides (the print just showed through), he picked one up, let the curtain fall and stuffed the flyer into one of his secret pockets (where, through his glove, he felt the package he’d been carrying around for Alfred all evening), entered the green-lit, scrawled-over tile, and stepped out under green (for licensed) street coordinates, onto pink, licensed pavement.