Between the high roofs the sensory shield, dark blue, blushed here and there with silver. He tried to remember what they had said on parting and found it oddly fuzzy—which was when he realized how clearly he remembered everything else, starting from the performance and ending with that moment when, entwined, they had slept.
The Spike was going. Today. So it was stupid to mull on it.
But each incident of the night, with its disappointment still intact, as well as its security, its relaxation, its almost unbearable pleasure, came back with such clarity something caught in his throat at each image. (Only smells usually returned memories to him that vividly.) Three times, on his way to the all-night Transport Station in the Plaza of Light, he stopped still on the street. And four times, as he sat, staring out of the window at Tethys’ galaxy of predawn stars, drop—
ping behind into the blue (like some flight to Neriad, and then on ...) he came near tears.
“... to bother you at this hour, but I just wanted to get you your stuff as soon as possible, while it was still on my mind, you know? In case you ... well, you’ve got it now.” Up the inch-wide door-crack ran a flesh colored ribbon. At the top of it was tousled hair and a single, green, red-rimmed eye. At the bottom, after various mottlings, modelings, and creases, were thick veins and dirty toenails. “Okay.” The door clicked closed.
Bron turned in the quiet hallway, walked across to his own room, pulling off his gloves—for a moment he looked at his own, colorful, well-cared-for fingers—took off his mask, and shouldered inside.
4. La Geste D’helstrom
/ think that a philosophical gnat might claim that the gnat society is a great society, or at least a good society, since it is the most egalitarian, free, and democratic society imaginable,
The melancholy left after three more hour’s sleep.
The energy (and vividness) remained all the way to work, till, by three o’clock (he’d skipped lunch), when he was going over the Day Star’s preprogram specifications yet again, it hit him: P would have to intersect less than half of Not-P (as well as pieces of Q, R, and S, while cleaving T); also it must surround more than half of it; and be tangent to it at not less than seven (which had been self-evident) and not more than forty-four (which had been the bitch!) points. That was getting somewhere.
Immensely pleased, he marched to Audri’s office with his find.
“Great,” Audri said, looking up from her desk. “For a reward you get a two-week vacation.”
Bron said, “Mmmm?”
Audri leaned back and put her hands behind her head. “I said you get two weeks off, starting tomorrow.”
“I don’t under—” Suddenly he remembered some vague thing she’d said yesterday about “threatening”: “Hey, look, now! That girl got another job. I mean, I saw her, later, and she’s all right!”
Audri frowned. “What girl are you—Oh, for crying out loud, Bron! Don’t give me any of your hard-time crap.” Her hands came down on the desk. “I can’t take it today. People are being laid off all over the whole hegemony. If you’d been at lunch, you’d’ve heard!”
“Well, I didn’t want lunch,” he protested, automatically. “I wanted to work. That’s how I got the—”
She stopped him with lightly closed lids. “Look.” They opened. “You can either take a two-week vacation with eight percent reduction in credit for the duration—”
“Eight percent!”
“—or quit. Half a dozen people have. I’ve got to take ten days off myself. And, I’ve got to think of something to do with the kids.”
Although Bron liked Audri, he didn’t like her three children. When, from time to time, they came to the office, he found them precocious, presumptuous, and obdurate. She lived with them in a gay, women’s co-op (not a commune—room, food, and work arrangements were friendly but formal) in an unpretentious spiral tower a unit from Bron’s own squat, blocky building. With none of the laminated ostentation of Philip’s mul-tisexed, on-the-Ring dwelling, nor the insistently tatty quaintness of a u-1 sector domicile, it was the most comfortable home he had visited on Tethys. All three visits, in fact had left him strangely relaxed and, strangely, depressed—but it had taken him three visits to realize they were two reactions.
Bron swallowed (and forgot) his next protest.
“We don’t have to get hysterical yet, I suppose,” Audri said. “It’s only eight percent—this time. And just for two weeks. They want to make everything look like its working at full capacity, only that people just all happen to be off doing something else.”
“What sort of logic—or metalogic—is that?”
“I have three degrees in this subject and am in the midst of getting another one—which is three more than you—and / don’t have the foggiest idea.” Audri leaned her palms on the desk edge. “Look. Just get out of here. If you come up with any more on Day Star this afternoon, shove it under Phil’s or my door. But don’t bother us. Okay? And don’t come in tomorrow.”
Wonderingly, he said (he hadn’t meant it to, but it sounded a little belligerent): “Okay ...” and returned to his office.
He thought many confused thoughts, and didn’t even bother to open the Day Star folder again.
The energy was gone by the time he returned to Serpent’s House. Sitting in the commons, alone in a conversation niche, he reread the flyer picked up that morning from the booster-booth’s floor:
“THESE THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN YOUR CITY!!!”
But, as he absorbed each political atrocity, he kept thinking of other things not happening in the city: like the performances of the little micro-theater troupe; and its director, who was no longer a resident. In a way he would not have dared define, it made the atrocities worse.
“You want to continue from where we left off?” Sam put the case up on the table and sat. “Lawrence said to set up the pieces as best we remembered, and he’d come down in ten minutes and make corrections.” Sam thumbed back brass claws, opened out the board.
Bron said: “Sam, how do you reconcile working for the government with the appalling political situation on Triton?”
Sam raised an eyebrow.
Between them micro-waves lapped, micro-breezes blew, micro-trees bent, and micro-torrents plashed and whispered down micro-rocks.
“I mean, there you are in the—what is it? Liaison Department? Political commitment isn’t a perimeter, Sam; it’s a parameter. Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you ever doubt?”
“What great metaphysical crisis have you just been through that’s suddenly gotten all your angst up?”
“We’re not talking about me. I asked you a question.” So as not to face the answer, Bron opened the case’s side drawer, removed the transparent plates of the astral cube and began to assemble them on their brass stilts. When he did glance up, Sam was regarding him seriously, the cards in his dark fingers halted in midshuffle. A corner of the White Novice showed, curved against Sam’s darkly pinkish palm.
“Yes.” The White Novice fell. “I doubt.” Fifty cards fell, riffling, after it. “Frequently.” For a moment, a little laughter shook, silent, behind Sam’s face; Sam’s eyes went back to the cards. He parted the pack, shuffled again.
“Come on. What do you doubt?”
“I doubt if someone like you could really be asking me a question like that for purely autonomous reasons.”
Bron pulled out the other side drawer of velvet-cradled ships, warriors, horsemen, herdsmen, and hunters. “There are no autonomous reasons. Whatever makes the question come up in my mind, the fact that it is in my mind is what makes it my question. It still stands.” He picked up the screen showing the horned head of Aolyon (cheeks puffed with hurricane winds) and set it, on its tiny base, upon the waters—which immediately darkened about it; green troughs and frothing crowns rolled about the little stretch of sea.