While heated conferral began among the women behind the glass, another woman pushed between them to look: and that was Audri, who grinned, nodded at him quickly, then turned away to join the conference.
Bron made come-out gestures.
They made helpless gestures back.
Bron made open-the-window gestures.
They made more helpless.
Someone carefully mimed something Bron thought must mean the front door was locked.
Bron made stand-back motions, took off his sandal, then thought better and got Lawrence to give him one of the green shoes, and made to hurl it at the window. Some of the women inside looked distressed. Others laughed. They all stood back.
So Bron hurled it, heel first.
The glass shattered into an opaque web—that hung there. It was backed with plastic film so that he had to throw the shoe several times more, and than finally tear it away with his hand, nicking his fingers several places.
“Come on, you’ve got to get out!”
“What?”
“You’ve got to evacuate this area,” he shouted into the shadowed room full of women. “Audri? Hey, Audri, you have to get out of here.”
“I told you those were evacuation instructions,” one of the women was saying loudly to a group at the back of the room, “before the public channels went dead.”
“Audri, you better get your kids and—Audri?”
But she had left the room with several others.
Bron climbed through the window (a woman he hadn’t seen helped him down), while Lawrence went around to the front, and Bron more or less figured out from overlapping snippets that they hadn’t wanted to open the front door because of the man Bron and Lawrence had seen shouting. At which point a dozen children came into the room with several mothers, among them Audri (who was wearing a bright scarlet body-stocking with a lot of feathery things trailing from her head-band). “Hey!” He made his way to her side, took her shoulder. “You better get your kids together so we can get out of here—”
She blinked at him. “What do you think we’re doing? You said we had to evacuate, didn’t you? Everyone will be down in a second.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Oh, yeah. Sure.” More kids came in.
Two women were calling out instructions.
“Urn ...” Bron said. “Hey! They better all wear shoes. There’s lots of junk in the street.”
Three children dashed out of the room to get them.
A woman who seemed to be in charge turned to Bron. “It really was something, your coming to tell us.
Nobody’s quite known what was going on since the retaliation this afternoon. And then with Mad Mike outside—well, he seems to be gone now. But we didn’t know whether he’d done something to interfere with our channel reception or whether it was just part of the general confusion. With gale-force winds going on and off, nobody wanted to go out anyway, especially with the kids.” Freddie and Flossie were the only one-parent family at Serpant’s House; but at a sexually specified co-op, straight or gay, you would expect a few more. Also, of course, this was a woman’s co-op. And, as a public-channel survey had once put it: As long as women bore 70 percent of the children, you couldn’t be surprised that nearly 60 percent of the one-parent families had a woman at their head.
As they were leaving the building (one of Audri’s boys had glommed onto Lawrence, along with another kid Bron had never seen) Bron asked: “Who was that Mad Mike character?”
Audri glanced around, checking, then said, confidentially: “He used to live with John—” She nodded toward a woman, in something flimsy, cream-colored and diaphanous, who, till now, he’d just assumed was one of the older children.
“She had two children by him. He’s some sort of very eccentric craftsman, but what kind I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you let him in?”
Audri humphed. “The last three times she did, as soon as he got her alone, he beat her up; then sat her down for the next hour and explained why it was all her fault he’d done it. Really, John’s sweet, but she’s not very bright. We were trying to get through to the e-girls, but communication was out both in and out of the place.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Yeah ... well. I guess, maybe because they were his children—”
Audri humphed again. “This sudden revitalization of interest only started a year back when he became a Christian. He apparently wasn’t very interested in them back when she was having them, or in the two years right after.” Audri scanned the group as it turned the corner. “I mean, if he wants kids of his own, there are ten ways he can go about getting them—here, that is. And at least twenty-five over in the u-1.”
Bron followed the herd of women around the corner. “I thought he might have been a Christian.” They were heading back toward the Plaza of Light. “From some of the expressions he used.” He looked up at the unfamiliar and unsettling night. “You know, they’re almost as much trouble as the Jews?”
Audri said: “Hev, come on, you kids. Stop horsing around. This way. Where did he go, anyway? He usually hangs around a good deal longer when he decides to make a nuisance of himself. He was getting to be quite a neighborhood character.”
“Oh,” Bron said, feeling uncomfortable again. “Well, he saw Lawrence and me and then he ... went away.”
Audri glanced at him. “You scared him off? You get a vote of thanks for that! Character or not, he was getting to be a pain.”
A child came up to ask Audri about something Bron didn’t understand, to which she returned a (to Bron) incomprehensible answer, while Bron wondered when he would tell Audri of Mad Mike’s fate. No matter how uncomfortable it made him, he had to do that.
Audri said: “It was downright heroic of you to come around and give us a hand like this. We were all pretty scared. Some of the sounds coming in from outside—and I just don’t mean Mike’s carrying on ... Well, they weren’t the sort to encourage you to take to the streets.”
Bron was preparing to sav, Mike is probably dead, when the skv (or rather the shield) came on.
The children cheered—which brought some dozen e-girls charging from the next alley:
What did they think they were doing in a restricted area?
Trying as best thev could to get out of it!
Didn’t they know that there was serious gravity derangement all over this sector of the citv? Over a hundred and six people had been reported dead already!
That was just why they were trying to leave! Which way should thev go?
Well, actually, the sensory shield’s going on was the official signal that it was all under control again. They could go back home if thev wanted.
Which brought more cheers, and laughter from the women.
Already other people were appearing in the street.
Bron turned to sav something to Audri, only to find Lawrence at his shoulder.
“Let’s go home,” Lawrence said. “Please? Let’s go home now.”
Bron didn’t want to go back to Serpent’s House. He wanted to so back to Audri’s, and have the women give him coffee and a meal and talk and smile and laugh with him, joke about his breaking the window and make much about his coming to rescue them and his scaring off the crazy Christian. But there would be the kids. And alreadv women were—
“... at work next week!” Audri was calling across lots of heads and waving.
“Oh, yeah!” Bron waved back. “I’ll see you. At work.”
“Come on.” Lawrence said. “Please?” Bron started to sav something angrv. But it failed. “Sure.” Bron sighed. And after thev had walked through two and a half units: “This has been some vacation!”
The Spike’s (nonfacsimile) letter was waiting for him on his table.
In his clean room (the cupboard door was still open, but he was too tired to close it), he sat on his bed and reread it. Then he read it once more. Halfway through he realized he wasn’t even hearing it in the Spike’s voice, but in the voice of the woman at Audri’s co-op who had been calling instructions to the other women. He started again, this time hearing the accusations in the electronically strained tone of the hegemony’s Personnel receptionist. He read it once more, finally in the voice of the e-girl who’d been hallooing that he could not pass the cordon, and whom he’d tricked by joining the mumblers.