“Oh, thank youl” the tall young woman cried. “Thank you ... !” The swing began to rise into the dark, by creaks and starts, wound up on a rackety pulley. “Thank you all! I mean, I had no idea, when you just suggested that we sit down on this thing that, suddenly, we would ... Oh, it was just marvelous!”
Heads, hands, and knees, they jerked up into the shadow, away from the decimal clock, dim and distant on the dark.
The Spike, head-mask still under her arm, was talking to the woman who held the little girl now in her arms. All three were laughing loudly.
Still laughing, the Spike turned toward Bron.
He pulled off one of his gloves and tucked it under his arm with his own mask, just to do something. He was trying to think of something to say, and already the anger at not finding it was battling his initial pleasure.
“You did wonderfully! I always like to use as many new people in the performance as possible. In this kind of thing, their concentration and spontaneity lend something to it no amount of careful rehearsal can give. Oh, how marvelous!” suddenly taking his hand and looking at it (his nails, newly lacquered that morning when he’d decided on the dark attire, were, like Windy’s, multihued and iridescent): “I do love color on a man! I make Windy wear it whenever I can.” She looked down at his mask, at hers. “The only trouble with these things is that unless you break your neck, you can’t see anything more than five feet off the ground!”
“What’s this about your final performance?”
“That’s right. Next stop—” Her eyes rose to the ceiling dark—“Neriad, I believe. And after that—” She shrugged.
Bron felt it through their joined hands. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well—you were so busy finding out about me I didn’t get a chance.” A few syllables of laughter surfaced over her smile. “Besides, / was so busy trying to figure out how to get you here in time to go on, I wasn’t really thinking about anything else. Did you enjoy it?”
“Yes.”
“I’d hate to think what you’d have said if you hadn’t! You just sounded like you were agreeing to supervise your own execution—” at which point painted arms, with iridescent multihued nails, flapped around her shoulder. Long red hair fell forward over her satin tunic; a bass voice growled from under it: “Come on, honey, let’s go make this a night to remember!”
She shrugged Windy away (Bron unclenched his teeth) with: “I remember too many nights with you already. Cut it out, huh?”
The head nuzzling in her neck came up, shook back the red hair (it was the first time he had seen it right side up for more than a second at a time: good-natured, pockmarked, scraggy-bearded) and grinned at Bron: “I’m trying to make you jealous.”
You’re succeeding, Bron didn’t say: “Look, that’s all right. I mean, your friends are probably having some sort of cast party to celebrate—” Somehow one handful of multihued nails were now hooked over Bron’s shoulder, the other still on the Spike’s:
Windy stood between them: “Look, I’ll leave you guys alone. Back at the co-op, they’ve said we can party in the commons room as late as we like.” He shook his red head. “Those women want us out of there in the worst way!”
Both hands rose and fell at once. Bron thought: That’s politic.
“See you back at the place—”
“We won’t be using the room for the whole—”
“Sweetheart,” Windy said, “even if you were, I got invites to several others.” And Windy turned and bounded off to help someone carry away what the exercise wheel had collapsed into.
The Spike’s other hand came up to take Bron’s; his eyes came back to see them, one bare with colored nails, three gloved (two in white, one in black). “Come,” she said, softly. “Let me take you ...”
Later, whenever he reviewed those first three encounters, this was the one he remembered most clearly; and was the one that, in memory, most disappointed. Exactly why he was disappointed, however, he could never say.
They did return to the co-op; she had put her arm around his shoulder, their capes had rustled together; bending toward him, as they walked through the streets, she had said: “You know I’ve been thinking about those things you were saying to me, about your boss. And everything—” (He’d wondered when she’d had time to think:) “All through the performance, actually. I just couldn’t get it out of my head. The things you seem to have confused to me seem so clear. The arrows you seem to be assuming run from B to A to me so obviously run from A to B that I tend to distrust my own perception—not of the Universe, but of what in the Universe you’re actually referring to. You seem to have confused power with protection: If you want to create a group of people, join a commune. If you want to be protected by one, go to a co-op. If you want both, nothing stops you from dividing your time between the two. You seem to have making a family down as an economic right denied you which you envy, rather than an admirable but difficult economic undertaking. Just like Mars, we have antibody birth control for both women and men that makes procreation a normal-off system. You have free access to birth pills at a hundred clinics—”
“Yes,” he said, to be shocking: “I’ve taken them once—for a fee.”
And in typical satellite fashion she did not seem to register any shock at all. Well, they were in the u-1, where the shocking was commonplace, weren’t they.
“You only have two decisions to make about a family,” she was going on. “Somewhere around name-day, you decide if you want to have children by accident or by design; if by design—which well over ninety-nine percent do—you get your injection. Then, later, you have to decide that you do want them: and two of you go off and get the pill.”
“I know all that—” he said; and she squeezed his shoulder—to halt him speaking, he realized. “That,” he finished, “at least, is the same as in Bellona.”
“Yes, yes. But I’m just trying to spell the whole thing out to see if I can figure out where you got off the track. With it set up this way, less than twenty percent of the population chooses to reproduce.” (That was not the same as Bellona; but then, Mars was a world, not a moon.) “In a closed-atmosphere city, that’s just under what we can tolerate. In the satellites we try to dissolve that hierarchical bond between children and economic status Earth is so famous for—education, upkeep, and social subsidy—so that you don’t have the horrible situation where if you have no other status, there’s always children. And no matter how well you perform, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’ve got sex confused with. On the one hand, you tell your story in a perfectly coherent way—only I’ve been to parties at family communes in, if not on, the Ring. I’ve been to parties at nonfamily co-ops, where, among forty or fifty adults there were always two or three one-parent families. I’ve been to parties given by adolescent family communes who, for religious reasons, lived in the streets. They’ve all got the same basic education available; and basic food and shelter you can’t be denied credit for at any co-op ,..” She had gone on like this, pulling him closer every time he began to wonder what she was trying to say, till he stopped listening—just tried to feel, instead. They were already at the party by now. One of the first things he did feel was the faint hostility (Windy, who was really a pretty nice guy he decided, and Dian, who by the end of the evening was the nicest person, as far as he was concerned, in the company—with none of the Spike’s brittleness and a gentler way with her equally astute insights—pointed a few subtle examples of it out) between the women who lived at the co-op and the commune who were leaving the next morning. “Though I suppose,” Dian said, leaning arms as hairy as Philip’s on equally hairy knees, “it would try anybody’s patience to have a bunch of strolling players parked in your cellar, carrying on till all hours, while rumors of plague are flying ...” and she nodded toward a modest Triton with the Alliance Now poster on the wall.