—happily reasonable men and women, Bron thought, as Prynn stalked off. Take any five of them . • . But she did not want to look too hard at any—
one. Not just yet. There, a man in a skirt of brown/green/orange cloth; there a woman’s naked hip, another’s fur-mantled shoulder. And there, in a hint at coming styles, Bron saw, on someone’s back moving off among those gathered at the bar, a green plastic Y snapped to blue suspenders ... But she would not focus on any individual, which made it all giddily adventurous—though she was familiar enough with such places from another world, another time, another life. She started to move around toward the other side of the bar to wait for someone to approach her—and experienced the oddest reaction.
If someone had asked her, then, what is was, she would have answered, astonished, “Terror!” Ten seconds into the feeling, however, and she realized it was more subtle than that. It was more like an insistent annoyance, signaling from some place edging consciousness that something extremely dangerous was near. Then, it resolved: She was here to be approached. But she was not here to invite approach. Certainly, she could not linger on the active side of the bar where she was now. That was just not the sort of woman she was interested in being taken for. If the man she was looking for were here (Any five ... ? She thought, irrelevantly. Now she dared not look anywhere except the baseboard on the counter, between the legs of the people standing beside it, six feet away) even being seen on this side would spoil everything. She turned, heading for free-range, passing Prynn, who, elbows on the bar, had eyes only for the older of the two women working behind the counter—certainly the oldest person in the place, probably in Lawrence’s league. (And probably, Bron thought, a sharer of Lawrence’s tastes.) As Bron reached the free area, she thought: What they need here, of course, is three counters: One for the ones who want to approach; and then one for the people who want to be approached; then one for the people who wouldn’t mind being approached—but no, that wasn’t the answer. There wasn’t any difference between not-minding-it, and wanting-it-but-just-wanting it-a-little-less. Well, then: four ... ? With a vision of an infinite regression of counters, each with fewer and fewer people at it, until she, herself and alone, stood at the last, Bron took her place at the center of free-range, where, indeed, a plurality of the reasonable and happy women and men in the place had gathered. She moved as close to the bar as she could get, looking, she knew, like a woman who wasn’t interested in anything sexual at all. And in a place like this (she knew), that probably meant she would get no advances at all because there were too many people there who were. Oh, there’d be a few who, tired of the chase, might just want to engage in some—
“Yeah,” a pleasant-looking youngster standing next to her said, leaning his elbows on the bar. “There really are times when it’s just like that.” He cocked his head, smiled, nodded.
Bron said: “There are a hundred and fifty other people in here you could approach who would be more interested in it than I am, Now get lost. And if you don’t, I’ll kick you in the balls. And I mean it!”
The youngster frowned, then said: “Hey, sorry ... f” and turned away, while somebody else wedged into his place. And Bron thought, a little hysterically: I am in the position where I am here to be approached and cannot acknowledge an approach of any sort: otherwise, I will turn off the person I am here to be approached by. That’s ridiculous! she thought, shaking her head for the third time to the younger of the two women bartenders, who’d just asked her again what she wanted to drink. What in the world does that get you? In another time, on another world (or, indeed, in another bar, with the rules carefully spelled out in the monthly newsletter), raped. And that wasn’t the answer either, because once on Mars (it had been the night after his nineteenth birthday) he had been raped, by a gang of five women with hard, metallic eyelids as banal as the lyrics to all the thousand (orphan-) Annie-shows that had spawned them, hell raising through the dawn-dim alleys of the Goebels and enraged by the symbol above his right eye; and though, for a few months, he had actually fantasized sexually about the one of the five who hadn’t (actually) taken part and (for the first few minutes) tried to stop the others, he’d known even then that was just a strategy for salvaging something from a thoroughly unpleasant experience that had left him with a sprained thigh, a dislocated shoulder, and a punctured eardrum which (in another world, at another time) might have made him deaf in one ear for life. Remembering, she ran a foreknuckle along her gold brow—completely meaningless on a woman, of course; but out here no one would know. No one would care.
I simply shouldn’t be here, Bron thought. The fear that it was somehow the sex itself she was afraid of was what, she realized, had held her here this long. (And that, she suddenly realized, was pushing an hour!) But it was everything else that circled the sex, that kept it closed, locking it in, and—was this something to be thankful for?—somehow pure.
Bron took her hands from the counter, stepped back, turned—
He stood at the “active” side of the bar, among the men and women there, just turning from a conversation, his face settling, from its laughter, into the familiar dignity, the familiar strength. (Had she dreamed about it ... yes!) His eyes swept the room—passing hers, but her belly tightened when they did—to the even more boisterous “passive” bar.
Go, she thought. Go!
Really, it was time to leave! But he was there, like all she could ever remember imagining, as new as now and familiar as desire. She watched, numbing, knowing she had known him laughing among his hard-drinking friends, dark brows a-furrow in concentration over a problem whose solution might roll worlds from their orbits, carelessly asleep on a bed they had shared for the night, his eyes meeting hers in an expression that encompassed all the indifference of now but backed by the compassion of the unspeakably strong, the ineffably wise, and the knowledge of half a year’s companionship.
She pushed from the bar, started toward him, thinking: / mustn’t! I—and shouldered quickly between two people, her throat drying with the fear that, while she was turning to excuse herself here, beg a pardon there, he might leave. She couldn’t do this! This was all hopelessly and terribly wrong. But she was pushing between the last two, now, reaching to touch his naked shoulder.
He turned, frowned at her.
Bron whispered: “Hello, Sam ...” and then (by dint of what, she didn’t know) felt a smile quiver about her own mouth. “Need any new wives in your commune, Sam ... Or am I sallow enough ... ?”
For a moment Sam’s full mouth compressed into a great, black prune, the expression almost shock, or pain. Then his eyes left her face to drop down her body; and came slowly back, with a smile that was almost mocking. “Bron ... ?”
Let there be something beside derision in his smile, she whispered silently; her eyes closed lightly before it. “Sam, I ... I shouldn’t be here ... I mean on this side of the ... I mean ...” Bron blinked.
Sam’s hands came down on her shoulders, like black epaulets (in the half-light, Sam’s skin really was black, with a dim bronze highlight under his jaw, a dark amber one coiling his ear), and she had the wild vision she had somehow just risen in rank (thinking: And not a single soldier ...) and thinking at the same time: And it still isn’t sex! I know what sex is too well to fool myself into thinking that.
Sam was saying: “Hey, there!” And, “Well!” and then: “I admit, I’m ...” Then just nodded, with ap-proval(!) and with (still) the smile. “How’ve you been, huh? The Old Pirate mentioned you’d suddenly decided to cross the great divide. You keeping well?”