Samuel R, Delany tables were always grouped alone), no people—although, as the little redhead took evident delight in explaining, if you took the time they had spent on mechanical transportation and averaged it out at even a hundred fifty K’s an hour, they could be as much as two thousand kilometers from their point of arrival—quite a distance on a moon, but not so long considering they were on Earth.
It was a sumptuously pleasant and totally edgeless time—indeed, its only edges were provided by those moments when he could reflect on how edgeless it was.
One morning (at least he thought it was morning), wondering if he could hunt up anyone else who had also overslept for a late breakfast, Bron came out of his room and was crossing between a lot of lush vegetation under a high, mirrored ceiling, when he saw Sam hurrying toward him, looking worried.
And two strangers in red and black uniforms were coming toward him from where they’d apparently been waiting by a thick-trunked tree. The woman grabbed Bron’s shoulder. The man said: “You’re a moonie, aren’t you? Come on!”
And twenty feet away, Sam froze, with a perfectly shocked expression.
5. Idylls In Outer Mongolia
We may note that, in these experiments, the sign “=“ may stand for the words “is confused with.”
He started to say: “I am a moonie. But I doubt if I’m the moonie you’re—” But they led him, roughly, off through the imitation jungle.
Rusted metal showed through the door’s gray paint: the amazing lock contraption actually had a hole for a key; bright red letters spelled out exit.
They pushed through into a cement stairwell. He protested once and got a shove for it; they hurried him up. The walls and steps and banisters were grimed to an extent for which neither youth on Mars nor maturity on Triton had prepared him. More apprehensive each flight, he kept thinking: Earth is an old world ... an old, old world.
They pulled him, breathless with the climb, out on a narrow sidewalk as a good number of people hurried past (who, in the less than fifteen seconds he got to see them, must, he decided, have only three basic clothing styles the lot); only one glanced.
Above irregular building tops (he had never seen irregular building tops before), the air was a grainy gray-pink, like a sensory shield gone grubby (was that sky? With atmosphere in it ...?). A warm, foul odor drifted in the street (equally astonishing). As they pushed him to the vehicle, a surprising breeze (it was the first breeze he’d ever felt not produced by blower convections from some ventilator grate within meters)
carried with it a dozen, clashing, and unpleasant smells.
“In here!”
They opened the vehicle door and shoved him down into a seat; “sky”—colored ticking pushed from one open seam. The two uniformed strangers (some kind of e-girls) stalked around the other side, leaving him momentarily alone with clambering thoughts (I could run\ I could run now ...!), but the unfamiliarity of everything (and the conviction that there was some mistake) paralyzed him: then they were inside too; the doors slammed: the vehicle dropped straight down, and was caught up by, and bounced into, a subterranean stream of traffic with the jerkiest acceleration and, save for the Earth-landing, the strongest, he’d ever felt.
Ten minutes later he was yanked (“All right! I’m not trying to resist! I’m coming. I’m—”) and yanked again from the car and hauled past towering buildings and finally marched into one that might have been eighty, a hundred eighty, or eight hundred years old (the oldest extant structure in Bellona was a hundred and ten years old; in Tethys, no more than seventy-five). He had not even noticed this time if there were sky outside or not.
A lift with a grimy brass gate took them up three floors (which seemed silly, as they had just walked up at least eight in the hotel): he was led across a hallway and shoved (one of his sandals slipped and he went down on one bare knee; he was wearing only shorts and a light V-shirt) into a cement-floored room with paint-peeled plaster walls. The door shut behind him; as he stood up, rubbing his knee (yes, the one he’d sprained last year), there were loud clicks and clashes as bars and locks and catches were thrown. The window was too high to see out, even if you (which he didn’t because his knee hurt) jumped. The metal door was dull-gray, with scuffs and scratches at ... kicking level! The room was maybe ten feet by eight.
There was no furniture.
He stayed in it almost five hours.
Getting hungrier, getting thirstier, finally he had to go to the bathroom. Beside the door, set in the corner of the cement floor, was a green, metal drain. He urinated in it and wondered where he was supposed to do anything else.
He was sitting in the corner across from it, when the door, clattering its sunken locks, pushed open. Two red and black uniformed guards stepped in, yanked him to his feet, and held him flat against the wall, while a portly, bald man in the least comfortable-looking of the three basic styles came in and said: “All right. What do you know about these people?”
Bron really thought he meant the guards.
“The moonie delegation!”
“... nothing—?” Bron said, wonderingly.
“Tell us, or we’ll fish it out of you—and the places in your brain we fish it out from won’t ever be much good for anything again: because of the scar tissue—that’s assuming you ever get a chance to use it again, where we’ll be sending you for the rest of your life when we’re finished.”
Bron was suddenly angry and terrified. “What ... what do you want to know?”
“Everything you know. Start at the beginning.”
“I ... I just know it’s a political mission of ... of some sort. I really don’t know anything else about it. Sam is ... Sam just asked me to come along as part of the ... the entourage.”
“It’s funny,” one of the guards said to nobody in particular. “The moonies always sit in the corner soon as you leave ’em alone. Marsies and Earthmen always sit at the center of the wall. I’ve always wondered why.”
The portly man looked askance, muttered, “Shit ...” and suddenly one of the guards punched Bron, hard, in the side, so that he crumpled down the wall, gasping and blinking—as they left.
The door slammed.
Locks clashed.
Both guards had been women.
Three hours later the locks clashed again.
As the two guards marched in, Bron struggled to his feet (from the spot in the center of the wall he’d fi—
nally, after much pacing, chosen to sit). They grabbed him, pulled him up the rest of the way, flattened his back against the wall. (The guards were both men this time.) Another man, less portly and with more hair, came in and asked Bron the identical questions—verbatim, he realized at the same time he realized (and began to worry that) his own answers were at least worded slightly different. At the end, the man took something out of his side pocket that looked like a watch with fangs. He came over and jabbed it against Bron’s shoulder—Bron twisted against the pain, not that it did much good the way the guards held him.
“Don’t wince!” the man said. “It’s supposed to hurt.” Ridiculous as the order and explanation was, Bron found himself trying to obey.
The man jerked the instrument away and looked at it. “Wouldn’t you know. He’s telling the truth. Come on.”
Bron looked down to see twin blood-blots on his V-shirt. Inside, something dribbled down his chest.
“It’s funny,” one of the guards said to nobody in particular. “The moonies always sit in the center of the wall as soon as you leave them alone. Marsies and Earthmen always take the corners.” And when Bron turned to protest, because that seemed just the last, absurd straw, the other guard punched him in the side: he crumpled down the wall, gasping, blinking.
The man opened the door, left; the guards followed. The one who had hit him paused, a hand on the door edge, and frowned at what time and fear and the pain in his gut had forced Bron to leave on the floor by the corner drain.