At the door, about to leave, Audri halted, looked back, grinned again, and said: “Congratulations, I guess,” winked and departed, bumping her shoulder on the jamb.
Bron smiled, relieved. But then, she’d always liked Audri.
Lunch?
She debated whether or not to go, right up to the minute. Staying away, of course, would only be putting things off. Just then, the console began to chatter and flash.
Another Art Department memo:
As the sculpture had been completed, three artists from a rival school, masked in turquoise but otherwise nudey had rushed into the cafeteria and, with flamers, destroyed the work, charring and melting the plates. The memo contained a statement from the marauders even more incomprehensible than the artist’s had been. (Basically, they seemed to be attacking the first artist’s math.) The sculptor, who was eighty-two, had suffered a psychotic episode (the memo went on) and been hospitalized, where she might well remain for several years, it appeared, from the initial diagnosis. Chances for her eventual return to art, however, were hopeful. The remains of the work would be on view through lunch, after which it would be removed to the hegemony’s museum, over the cafeteria, where it would stay on permanent exhibit. The memo closed with a flurry of apologies and was signed (typically) by Iseult, with a parenthetical note saying that Tristan dissented from the proposed suggestion and if enough alternates were put forward before closing, there would be a vote among them tomorrow.
An area of the cafeteria floor, blackened and strewn with burnt metal, was roped off. Every minute, one of the Seven Aged Sisters, in beaded green and silver, would leave her (or his) position by the cafeteria door, and come to walk, slowly, around the blistered enclosure (Bron stepped back from the taped rope to let the Sister pass), pausing every seventh step to make sacred and purifying signs, then, on completing his (or her) circuit, exchange serious words and nod dolefully with one or more of the spectators. (Just like the cafeteria of that Lux, Protyyn-recycling plant, Bron reflected Absolutely no difference at all!) Some of the statue’s motors, still working fitfully, now and then flapped a coruscated stub of aluminum around, twenty feet along the frame (which shook and clanked and tottered from floor to ceiling), while, somewhere else among the struts still standing, another metal plate tried to tug away from some twisted shape to which it had fused, the whole, charred horror attesting, perhaps more than the silvery creation intended, to the dark and terrible import of art.
Bron backed away, trying to envision the undamaged work, while others moved in to take her place at the rope. She had already decided that this lunch the meal would be a carnivorous one, and so was angling to tfce left, away from the vegetarian counter, when somebody put a hand on her shoulder.
She turned.
“Beautiful!” Philip exclaimed, a grin splitting his beard’s knap. “Audri told me, but of course I wouldn’t believe it till I saw—” Philip made a gesture with the backs of both hirsute hands toward Bron’s breasts. “Gorgeous .... ! This is permanent, now?”
“Yes,” Bron said, wishing they were not in the middle of the floor.
“Here,” Philip said. “Let’s get out of the middle of the floor,” and put his hand on Bron’s shoulder again, which Bron wished he wouldn’t do, to guide her over to the booths. But then Philip was touch-ish with all the female employees, Bron had noted before, sometimes with envy, sometimes with annoyance. (He was touch-ish with the male employees too, which, before, had just been annoying.) “And this ... um, goes all the way down?” Philip asked.
Bron did not quite sigh. “That’s right.”
“Just marvelous.” Philip dropped his hand but craned around to stare. “I can’t get over those tits! I’m green with jealousy!” He covered his slightly loose pectoral with spread fingers. (Philip had come in naked today.) “I have to make do with one; and then it’s just up and down like a leaky balloon. Bron, I want you to know I’m really impressed. I think you’ve probably found yourself. Finally. I think you just may have. It’s got that feeling about it, you know—”
Bron was about to say, Shove it, Philip, will you? when Audri said:
“Hey, there. Is Philip ragging you? Why don’t you lay off Bron, and let her get her lunch, huh?”
“Yeah,” Philip said. ‘“Sure. Get your lunch. We’re sitting right over there.” He gestured at a booth somewhere beyond the blackened disaster. “See you when you get back.”
As she moved through the line, Bron remembered her thought with Lawrence: A11 men have some rights, and considered it against her annoyance with Philip. Philip was certainly closer to the type of man she’d set herself to be interested in than, say, Lawrence. What, she wondered, would Philip be like in bed? The blus-teriness would transform to firmness. The honesty would become consideration. Philip (she considered, with distaste) would never think of lying on top of someone lighter than he was without invitation. And he would have some particularly minor kink (like really getting off on licking your ear) which he’d expect you to cooperate with and be just annoyingly obliging about cooperating with any of yours. In short, what she knew from the information left over from that other life: Philip was as sexually sure of himself as Bron had been. She had recognized it before. She recognized it now. And Philip was still (with his hand on the shoulder and his unstoppable frankness) the most annoying person she knew—plurality female configuration or not, she thought grimly. It was not that she felt no attraction; but she could certainly understand how, with men like Philip around, you could get to not like the feeling.
“Excuse me ... ?” someone said.
She said: “Oh, I’m so ...” and took her tray and started around the cafeteria.
She saw their booth, went toward it.
As she neared, she was sure she heard Philip say:
“... still doesn’t like to be touched,” and thought, as she took her place across from him, I didn’t hear the pronoun, but if I had and it was ‘he,’ I’d kill him. But the conversation was on Day Star and how the war seemed to have improved the personalities of two of the representatives, and what had happened to the third? No, he wasn’t a war casualty, that much had been established. (And wasn’t Lux just terrifying? Five million people!) One of the junior programmers said morosely: “I used to live in Lux,” which, even for a u-l’er, was incredibly gross. About the table, people’s eyes caught one another’s, then dropped to their trays, till someone picked up the conversation’s thread: But he had disappeared ... In the midst of these speculations, Philip leaned his elbows on the table and asked: “Say, where’re you living now?”
Bron told him the name of the women’s co-op.
“Mmm,” Philip said, and nodded. “I was just thinking, back when I was married—my second marriage, actually—my second wife was a transexual ... ?”
“When were you married?” asked the junior programmer, who wore a silver body-stocking from head to toe, with large black circles all over, and sat wedged in by the wall. “You’re not an earthie. They don’t even do that too much on Mars, now.”
The programmer, Bron realized. She was probably from Mars.
“Oh, I used to spend quite a bit of time in your u-1; you can make any kind of contract you want there: that’s why we’ve got it ... But that was back when I was a very dumb, and very idealistic kid. Like I was saying, my wife had started out as a man—”
“How’d she stack up to old Bron here?” the programmer asked.
“I pretend to be crude,” Philip said, leaning forward and speaking around Audri, “but you really are! She was great—” He settled back. “The marriage, however, was three or four times as bad as absolutely any sociologist I’d ever read on the subject said it would be, back when I was a student at Lux. And you know, I still had to do it two more times before I learned my lesson? But I was young then—that was my religious phase. Anyway; after we broke up and she left the mixed co-op where we were living, she moved into a straight, women’s co-op for a while—I mean, she was about as heterosexual as you can get, which may have been part of the problem, but nevertheless: then she moved into another women’s co-op that was nonspecific. I remember she said she thought it was a lot nicer—I mean, as far as she was concerned. They were a lot more accepting of general, nonsexual eccentricities and things like that, you know? It was a place called the Eagle, if I remember. It’s still going. If you have any problems with your place, you might bear it in mind.”