“I will,” Bron said.
The next day another memo came down from the Art Department. It seemed that, independently, twenty-seven people had come up with the suggestion that the memorial, in its new version, be titled The Horrors of War and so displayed in the hegemony museum. This suggestion had been duly passed on to the sculptor, in the hospital, who was apparently in touch enough to make the following reply: “No\ Nol
Flatly and bluntly No\ Title too banal for words! Sorry, art just does not work that way! (If you must name it something, name it after the last head of your whole, ugly operation!) It is my job to make works that you may get anything out of you wish. It is not my job to teach you how to make them! Leave me alone. You have done enough to me already.” And so Tristan and Iseult: A War Memorial was transferred upstairs, where from time to time Bron, on her way to the office library, stopped in to see it among the other dozens of works on exhibit. The burned and broken bits were all in a large carton near one base, where they gazed up at her like ashy skulls in which you could not quite find the eyes.
Bron kept the memo in her drawer. She cut the words of the old sculptor out of the flimsy to take home and hang on her wall. They had struck some chord; it was the first thing in her new life that seemed to indicate that there might be something to live for in the world besides being reasonable or happy. (Not that it was art—any more than it was religion!) And two weeks later, with Lawrence carrying the smaller packages, Bron moved from the straight Cheetah into the unspecified Eagle.
“Oh, this is much nicer,” Lawrence said, when they finally got things organized in the room. “I mean, everybody seems so much more relaxed here than back at the place I got for you.”
“As long as they don’t try to be so damned friendly,” Bron said, “and stay out of my hair, it’s got to be an improvement.”
After Lawrence left, she looked for the piece of flimsy to tape to the inside of her door. But it had gotten misplaced or dropped somewhere; at any rate, she couldn’t find it.
She had been living at the women’s co-op (the Eagle) six months now. This one had been working out well. On the fourteenth day of the nineteenth paramonth of the second yearN, at four o’clock (announced the lights around the Plaza), she considered once more, as she came out of the office lobby onto the crowded Plaza of Light, walking home—and, once more, decided against it: Just after lunch Audri had stopped her in the hall with raised finger and lowered brows: “You, I’m afraid, have been falling down in your work, Bron. No, it’s nothing serious, but I just thought I better mention it before it got serious. Your efficiency index blinks a little shakily on the charts. Look, we all know you’ve had a lot to adjust to—”
“Did Philip say something?” Bron had asked.
“Nope. And he won’t for at least another two weeks—which is why I’m mentioning it now. Look, just give it a little thought, see if there’s anything you can think of that would help you get it together. And let me know. Even if it’s something outside of work. Okay?” Audri smiled.
Back in her office cubicle, Bron had pondered. Once or twice she had consciously thought that she must be ready for her work to mean less to her than before; but that was supposed to happen only at the materialization of the proper man—though nothing like that man had come anywhere near materializing.
Take stock, she’d decided. What, she wondered, would her clinic counselor say? Leave an hour early, perhaps; walk home. Only, while she’d been pondering, closing time had crept up.
She would be satisfied with the usual transport and just stock-taking.
She went into the transport-station kiosk and down to the third level, which was rumored to be (fractionally) warmer and therefore (rumored to be) fractionally less crowded: the transport hissed in and, as the door slid back, a sign unrolled across it (simultaneously, inside, people stretched signs across the windows:
LUNA
RELIEF
ASSOCIATION
red letters blared on blue tissue.) The one across the door (orange on black on green on pink) said:
Bursting through the tissue, men and women began to distribute leaflets; the first passengers behind them were coming off, shoulders and heads brushing orange shreds.
“Really,” a man, wearing several rubber-rimmed privacy disks about his head, arms, and legs, said, “you’d think they could confine that sort of thing to the unlicensed sector. I mean, that’s why we’ve got it.”
A woman on the other side of him (apparently not with him) said testily: “Just think of it as theater.”
Bron looked. The disk the man wore around his forehead cut the woman’s profile at the nose. The man stepped from between them; Bron suddenly stopped breathing, stared.
The Spike glanced at her, frowned, started to say something, looked away, looked back, frowned again; then a politely embarrassed smile: “I’m sorry, for a moment you reminded me of a man I ...” She frowned again. “Bron ... ?”
“Hello ...” Bron said, softly, because her throat had gone dead dry; her heart knocked slow and hard enough to shake her in her sandals. “Hello, Spike ... how are ... ?”
“How are vow?” the Spike countered. “Well, this certainly—” She blinked at Bron—“is a surprise!”
There was a rising hiss of escaping air. “Oh—” the Spike said. “There goes my transport!”
Arriving passengers surged around them.
Bron said, suddenly: “Spike, come on! You want to get out of here and walk for a stop or two?”
The Spike was obviously considering several answers. The one she chose was: “No. I don’t want to, Bron ... Did you get the letter I wrote you—”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I did! Thank you. Really, thank you for explaining things to me.”
“I wrote it to take care of this when it happened, Bron. Because I knew it would. Oh, I don’t mean ... But really; No, I don’t want to walk a few stops with you: do you understand?”
“But I’ve changed!”
“So I’ve noticed.” Then she smiled again.
“Your letter was part of that, too.” Bron was trying to remember what exactly had been in the letter, other than its general crotchety tone. But that was part of her life which, day by day, had seemed less necessary to remember, easier to forget. “Please, Spike. I’m not the same person I was. And I ... I just feel I have to ... talk to you!”
The Spike hesitated; then the smile became a laugh, that had behind it, like a dozen echoes, some dozen other times she had laughed and Bron had thrilled. “Look ... I guess you have been through some changes. All right, I’ll walk you down another stop. Then we go on our ways, okay?”
As they reached the steps to the pedestrian corridor, a memory returned of another day when they had walked together, laughing, when suddenly the Spike had begun to complain that Bron was always talking about herself—Well, she had changed. She wondered what she might talk about to prove it.
At the side of the corridor, just before the street, stood a (“Know Your Place in Society”) kaleidoscopi-cally-colored booth. “Have you ever actually been in one of those?”
The Spike said: “What?”
“Every once in a while I go in just to see what the government’s got on me, you know?” They passed the booth, walked on into the street, under the sensory shield’s paler swirls. “A lot of people pride themselves on never going into one at all. But then, I’ve always sort of prided myself on being the type who does the things no one else would be caught dead doing. I guess the last time I went into one was about a month back—or maybe six weeks. I don’t know whether they’ve done it on purpose or not; Brian—that’s my counsellor at the clinic—says it’s more or less government policy, though there have been exceptions which she thinks are just government slipups, which I sort of doubt. I mean, whether you approve of it or disapprove, the government is usually right. Anyway, they only show clips taken since my operation. Isn’t that amazing? Perhaps this is their own, bizarre way of showing that they care—” Bron stopped, because the Spike was looking at another group of Luna-Reliefers: across the street, “Luna Is a Moon Too!” waved on bright placards.