It was the first Bron had heard of the computer course, which was annoying. On the other hand, there were some things about Alfred Lawrence didn’t know (if Lawrence thought Alfred could possibly go professional), which pleased him. Annoyance conflicting with pleasure produced a noncommittal grunt.
“You know,” Sam said, fanning the cards, “you are a patronizing bastard, Lawrence.”
Which increased Bron’s pleasure.
“I guess Mars is the only place where it is legal on the scale he’d need,” Lawrence went on, oblivious. “And of course he can’t go to Mars or Earth or anywhere like that, because of the war.”
Bron looked at their joint hand, reached over and reversed two of the cards.
Sam said: “Lawrence, I have to make an official trip to Earth; I’m leaving tomorrow. Do you want to come along? It’s on government credit: you’d have to share my cabin.”
“Lord!” Lawrence protested. “You mean be shut up in the same five-by-five with you while we fell into the sun, with the hope that a very small ocean on a very small world just happened to be in the way? No, thank you! I’d be crawling the walls!”
Sam shrugged and glanced at Bron. “You want to come?”
“Not with you.” Bron was thinking about work, actually—when, with a sting, he remembered that, for the next two weeks, he didn’t have any work. A trip away from this whole, mean, depressing moon? What better way to wipe her out of mind. “You could always take Alfred.” He wished Sam would ask again.
“Ha!” Sam said, without humor. “Let Lawrence work on him for another two hundred and fifty years. No ... the experience would be good for the kid. But I’ve got an entourage quota this trip—and there is the rest of the party coming along to consider. I need somebody fairly presentable, who can be at least vaguely sociable; and can also entertain themselves if they have to. You two, yes. Alfred, I’m afraid—” Sam shook his head.
“Why don’t you go, Bron?” Lawrence asked.
“Why don’t you?” Bron asked back, trying to sound sociable; it had a vaguely sullen ring.
“Me? Cooped up together with that body?” Lawrence studied the board. “It’s bad enough just trying to keep my self-control watching it loll around here in the commons. No; masochism no longer interests me, I’m afraid.”
“Well, it’s not—” (Sam had separated three cards out, apparently having decided on the first meld)—“as if I were born with it.”
“No, you go with him, Bron,” Lawrence said. “I’m just too old for hopping around the Solar System. And in time of plague to boot.”
“If I go, who’ll play your silly game?”
“Lawrence can teach Alfred,” Sam said.
“Perish the thought ... there’s as much chance of my teaching Alfred vlet as there is of Sam’s taking him to Earth. I think our objections are about the same.”
“We’ll be leaving tomorrow morning,” Sam said. “We’ll be back in twelve days. You’ll still have a couple of days back here to do nothing in, before you have to get back to work at—”
“How did you—?”
“Hey!” Lawrence said. “You don’t have to knock the board onto the floor!” He reset two pieces that Bron, starting, had overturned.
Sam, still looking at the cards, had that mocking smile, “Sometimes the government’s right.” His glance flicked up. “You coming?”
“Oh, all right.” Bron reached over and pulled out the four-car4 meld in the high Flames Sam had overlooked; which, for the first half hour of play, at any rate, gave them a decided advantage—before Lawrence, by adroit manipulation of all the gods and astral powers, regained his customary edge.
It was as if someone suddenly turned off the sensory shield.
To the left, jagged methane faces made scenery wild as that of some thousand ice-operas.
To the right the gritty rubble, which made ninety-six percent of Triton one of the dullest landscapes in the Solar System, stretched to the horizon.
They sped between, inside the clear conveyer tunnel. London Point dragged away behind. Sharp stars pierced the black.
Settled in his seat, with the two curved canopies of clear plastic over them (the stationary one of the car, and the tunnel above rushing backward at one hundred seventy-five kilometers an hour), Bron turned to the left (Sam was also sitting there), thought about ice-farmers, and asked: “I still wonder why you decided to take me.”
“To get you off my back,” Sam said affably. “Maybe it’ll lead you to some political argument that seriously challenges my own position. Right now, though, yours is so immature there’s nothing I can say to you, except make polite noises—however much those noises might sound to you like ideas. This way you’ll have a chance to see just the tiniest fraction of the government close up and check out what it’s doing. The government usually is right. In my experience that ‘usually’ is ninety-nine percent with lots more nines after the decimal point. I don’t know: maybe seeing a bit of the real thing will waylay your fears and shut you up. Or it may send you off screaming. Scream or silence, either’ll be more informed. Personally, with you, I’ll find either a relief.”
“But you have your educated opinion which direction I’m likely to go, don’t you?”
“That’s your fmeducated guess.”
Bron watched ice-crag pull away from ice-crag, kilometers beyond Sam’s shoulder. “And the government really doesn’t mind if you take me along? Suppose I find out some confidential top-secret information?”
“The category doesn’t even exist any more,” Sam said. “Confidential is the most restricted you can get; and you can see that in any ego-booster booth.”
Bron frowned. “People have been smashing the booths,” he said, pensively. “Did the government tell you that?”
“Probably would have if I’d asked.”
Broken glass; torn rubber; his own face distorted in the bent chrome slip: the image returned, intense enough to startle: “Sam, really—why does the government want someone like me along on a trip like this?”
“They don’t want you. I want you. They just don’t mind my taking you along.”
“But—”
“Suppose you do find out something—though what that could be I don’t even know. What could you do with it? Run shrieking through the streets of Tethys, rending your flesh and rubbing ies in the wounds? I’m sure there’s a sect that’s into that already. We simply live in what the sociologists call a politically low-volatile society. And as I think I said: the political volatility of people who live in single-sex, nonspecified sexual-preference co-ops tends to be particularly low.”
“In other words, given my particular category, my general psychological type, I’ve been declared safe.”
“If you want to look at it that way. You might, however, prefer to express it a little more flatteringly to yourself: We trust most of our citizens in this day and age not to do anything too stupid.”
“Both sets of words still model the same situation,” Bron said. “Metalogics, remember? Hey, you know, before I left Mars and came to Triton to be a respectable metalogician for a giant computer hegemony, I was a male hustler in the bordellos of Bellona’s Goebels. But then I got these papers, see ... What does your government, out here where both prostitution and marriage are illegal, think about thatV
Sam pushed his soft-soled, knee-high boots out into the space between the empty seats. “Before / came to Triton, I was a rather unhappy, sallow-faced, blonde, blue-eyed (and terribly myopic) waitress at Lux on Ia-petus, with a penchant for other sallow, blonde, blue-eyed waitresses, who, as far as the young and immature me could make out then, were all just gaga over the six-foot-plus Wallunda and Katanga emigrants who had absolutely infested the neighborhood; I had this very high, very useless IQ and was working in a very uninspiring grease-trough. But then I got this operation, see—?”
Bron tried not to look shocked.
Sam raised an eyebrow, gave a small nod.
“Did you find it a satisfactory transition?” Sex changes were common enough, but since (as Bron remembered some public channeler explaining) some of the “success” of the operation might be vitiated by admission, one did not hear about specific ones frequently.