Lawrence opened the drawer on the other side of the case and took out a handful of the small, mirrored and transparent screens (some etched with the same, alien constellations, some with different), set them upright beside the board, then reached back in for the playing pieces: carved foot soldiers, mounted men, model army-encampments; and, from this same drawer, two miniature cities, with their tiny streets, squares, and markets: one of these he put in its place in the mountains, the second he set by the shore. “I don’t see why you’re so busy dissecting all this—” Lawrence took up one red foot soldier, one green one, sat back in his chair, put the pieces behind his back—“when it seems to me all that’s happened is, in an otherwise dull day, you’ve had—from the way you described it—something of an aesthetic experience.” (Bron was thinking that seventy-four-year-olds should either get bodily regeneration treatments or not sit around the co-op common rooms stark naked—another thought he decided to suppress: it was Lawrence’s right to dress or not dress any way he felt like. But why, he found himself wondering, was it so easy to suppress some negative thoughts while others just proliferated?—like all those that had been forming about that theater woman, the Spike: which, essentially, was what he had been avoiding talking about for the last quarter of an hour.) Lawrence said: “If you were asking for advice, which you’re not, I’d say why don’t you just leave it at that. If you don’t mind comments, which I must assume you don’t, because despite all my other comments, you’re still talking to me and haven’t merely wandered away—” Lawrence brought his fists together above the mountains—“I can only suspect that, because you haven’t left it at that—the only logically tenable conclusion—there probably is more to it than that. At least as far as you’re concerned. Choose—”
Bron tapped Lawrence’s left fist.
The fist (Bron thought: Perhaps it’s simply because Lawrence is my friend) turned over, opened: a scarlet foot soldier.
“That’s you,” Lawrence said.
Bron took the piece, looked around at the other side of the case, and began to pick the scarlet pieces from their green velvet drawer. He stopped with the piece called the Beast between his thumb and forefinger, regarded it: the miniature, hulking figure, with its metal claws and plastic eyes, was not particularly dumb: during certain gambits, the speaker grill beside the dice-cup drawer would yield up the creature’s roar, as well as the terrified shouts of its attackers. Bron turned it in his fingers, pondering, smiling, wondering what else he might say to Lawrence other than “yes”—
“Freddie,” Lawrence said to the naked ten-year-old, who had wandered up to the table to stare (his head was shaved; his eyes were blue, were wide; he wore myriad bright-stoned rings, three, four, and five to a finger; and he was sucking the fore and middle-ones; the skin at one corner of his mouth was bright with saliva), “what are you staring at?”
“That,” Freddie said around his knuckles, nodding at the board.
“Why don’t you guys go to a nice, mixed-sex co-op, where there may be a few other children and, maybe, other people to take care of you?”
“Flossie likes it here,” Freddie said. His cheeks went back to their slow pulsing as Flossie (a head [also shaved] and a half taller, eyes as wide [and as blue], hands heavy with even more rings) came up to stand just behind Freddie’s shoulders.
Flossie stared.
Freddie stared.
Then Flossie’s brightly-ringed hand pulled Freddie’s from his mouth. “Don’t do that.”
Freddie’s hand went down long enough to scratch his stomach, then came back up: two wet fingers, a near dozen rings between them, slid back into his mouth.
Six months ago, Bron had just assumed that the two, who lived in adjacent rooms at the end of his corridor, were lovers; later, he’d decided they were merely brothers. Lawrence, with his ability to ferret out the gossipy truth, had finally revealed the story: Flossie, who was twenty-three and Freddie’s father, was severely mentally retarded. He had brought his ten-year-old son with him from a Cailisto-Port commune because there was a very good training and medical institute for the mentally handicapped here in Tethys. (The gemstones in those rings were oveonic, crystalline memory units, which, while they did not completely compensate for Flossie’s neurological defects, certainly helped; Flossie wore different rings for different situations. Freddie wore the rest. Bron had noticed Flossie often switched off with his son.) Who, or where, a mother was, neither seemed to care or know. From commune to co-op and back again, Flossie had raised Freddie since infancy. (“And he’s rather bright,” Lawrence had commented, “though with that finger-sucking, I think he suffers socially.”) Their names had been Lawrence’s idea (“An arcane literary reference as far beyond you as it is beyond them,” Lawrence had explained when Bron had requested explanation), codified when the two had started using them themselves. All right, what were their real names, then? someone had asked. Save their twenty-two digit government identity numbers, no one (they explained), had ever bothered to suggest any before which they particularly liked (“Which,” said Lawrence, “is merely a comment on the narrowness of the worldlets we live among.”).
“Now if you two want to watch,” Lawrence said, “you go over there and sit down. Standing up close like that and leaning over our shoulders will just make me nervous.”
Flossie put a glittering hand on Freddie’s shoulder: they went, sat, and stared.
Looking back at the board, Bron tried to remember what it was he had been about to answer ‘yes’—
“No—!”
Bron and Lawrence looked up.
“Here I am, running my tail off to get to this Snake Pit in time, and there you two are, already frozen in!” From the balcony, Sam leered hugely, jovially, and blackly over the rail. “Well! What can you do? Anybody winning?” Sam came down the narrow, iron steps, slapping the bannister with a broad, black hand. It rang across the common room.
Half a dozen men sitting about in reading cubicles, tape niches, or discussion corners looked up, smiled. Three called out greetings.
“Hey there ... !” Sam nodded back to the others and swung around the newel. He had a large, magnificent body which he always wore (rather pretentiously, Bron thought) naked. “How’ve you been going along since I left?” He came over to stand at the table’s edge and, with black fists on narrow, black hips, gazed down over the arrayed pieces.
Bron hated Sam.
At least, of the three people in the co-op he considered, from time to time, his friends, Sam was the one who annoyed him most.
“He’s getting pretty good,” Lawrence said. “Bron’s got quite a feel for vlet, I think. You’ll have to try some to catch up with him from where you were last time.”
“I’m still not in the same league with Lawrence there.” Bron had once actually traced the development of his dislike. Sam was handsome, expansive, friendly with everyone (including Bron), even though his work kept him away eleven days out of every two weeks. All that bluster and backslapping? Just a standard, annoying type, Bron had decided; but it was mitigated somewhat because, after all, Sam was just your average hail-fellow-well-met, trying to get along (and, besides, he was friendly to Bron).
About a month and a half later—revelation came slowly because Sam was away so much—Bron began to realize Sam was not so average. Under all that joviality, there was a rather amazing mind. Bron had already noticed, from time to time, that Sam had a great deal of exact information about a range of subjects which, with each new example of it, had grown, imperceptibly, astonishing. Then once, when Bron had been absently complaining about one of the more tricky metalogical programs at work, Sam had made a rather quiet, rather brilliant suggestion. (Well, no—Bron reminded himself; it wasn’t brilliant. But it was damned clever.) Bron had asked: Was Sam at one time into metalogics? Sam had explained: No, but he had known that Bron was, so a few weeks back he’d picked up a couple of tapes on the subject, a few books; and he’d found a programmed text in General Info that he’d flipped through a few frames of. That’s all. Bron did not like that. But then, Sam was just a good-looking, friendly, intelligent guy doing his bit as some overworked salesman/consultant that took him racketing back and forth from Tethys to Lux on Titan to Lux on Iapetus to Callisto Port, or even to the seedy hotels and dormitories clustering on the cheaper sides of the city centers of Bellona, Port Luna, and Rio. Bron had once even asked Sam what he did; the answer, with a sad smile and a shaking head, had been: “I troubleshoot after some really low-grade crap.” Sam, Bron had decided, was as oppressed by the system as anyone else. Bron had been saying something of the sort to Lawrence when Lawrence had explained that “oppressed by the system” was just not Sam at alclass="underline" Sam was the head of the Political Liason Department between the Outer Satellite Diplomatic Corps and Outer Satellite Intelligence; and had all the privileges (and training) of both: he had governmental immunity in practically every political dominion of the inhabited Solar System. Far from being “oppressed” by the system, Sam had about as much power as a person could have, in anything short of an elected position. Indeed, he had a good deal more power than any number of elected officials; it came home the next time Sam did: some outmoded zoning regulations had been plaguing the co-op and three others near them for more than a year (the mixed-sex co-ops, in which three-sevenths of the population lived, tended to get more reasonable treatment, someone had grumbled; someone else had grumbled that wasn’t true), and the construction for the laying of some new private-channel cable suddenly brought the zoning plan to the fore. Threatened with eviction again? But Sam, apparently, had walked into some office, asked to see three files, and instructed them to throw away half the contents of one of them; and there went the contradictory parts of the zoning regulations. As Lawrence said, “It would have taken the rest of us a year of petitions, injunctions, trials and what-all to get those zoning codes—that were illegal anyway—straightened out.” Bron didn’t like that either. But even if Sam was jovial, handsome, brilliant, and powerful, Sam was still living in a nonspecified co-op (nonspecified as to sexual preferences: there was a gay male co-op on the corner; a straight one three blocks away; yes, just over two fifths of the population lived in mixed co-ops, male/female/straight/gay, and there were three of those ranged elegantly one street beyond that, and a heterosexual woman’s co-op just behind them). If Sam had any strong sexual identifications, straight or gay, there would have been a dozen coops delighted to have him. The fact that Sam chose to live in an all-male nonspecific probably meant that, underneath the friendliness, the intelligence, the power, he was probably rotten with neurosis; behind him would be a string of shattered communal attempts and failed sexualizationships—like most men in their thirties who would choose such a place to live. This illusion lasted another month. No, one of the reasons that Sam was away for so long between visits (Sam explained one evening) was that he was part of a thriving family commune (the other fifth of the population) of five men, eight women, and nine children in Lux (on Iape-tus), the larger of the two satellite cities to bear the name.