/ think that a philosophical gnat might claim that the gnat society is a great society, or at least a good society, since it is the most egalitarian, free, and democratic society imaginable,
The melancholy left after three more hour’s sleep.
The energy (and vividness) remained all the way to work, till, by three o’clock (he’d skipped lunch), when he was going over the Day Star’s preprogram specifications yet again, it hit him: P would have to intersect less than half of Not-P (as well as pieces of Q, R, and S, while cleaving T); also it must surround more than half of it; and be tangent to it at not less than seven (which had been self-evident) and not more than forty-four (which had been the bitch!) points. That was getting somewhere.
Immensely pleased, he marched to Audri’s office with his find.
“Great,” Audri said, looking up from her desk. “For a reward you get a two-week vacation.”
Bron said, “Mmmm?”
Audri leaned back and put her hands behind her head. “I said you get two weeks off, starting tomorrow.”
“I don’t under—” Suddenly he remembered some vague thing she’d said yesterday about “threatening”: “Hey, look, now! That girl got another job. I mean, I saw her, later, and she’s all right!”
Audri frowned. “What girl are you—Oh, for crying out loud, Bron! Don’t give me any of your hard-time crap.” Her hands came down on the desk. “I can’t take it today. People are being laid off all over the whole hegemony. If you’d been at lunch, you’d’ve heard!”
“Well, I didn’t want lunch,” he protested, automatically. “I wanted to work. That’s how I got the—”
She stopped him with lightly closed lids. “Look.” They opened. “You can either take a two-week vacation with eight percent reduction in credit for the duration—”
“Eight percent!”
“—or quit. Half a dozen people have. I’ve got to take ten days off myself. And, I’ve got to think of something to do with the kids.”
Although Bron liked Audri, he didn’t like her three children. When, from time to time, they came to the office, he found them precocious, presumptuous, and obdurate. She lived with them in a gay, women’s co-op (not a commune—room, food, and work arrangements were friendly but formal) in an unpretentious spiral tower a unit from Bron’s own squat, blocky building. With none of the laminated ostentation of Philip’s mul-tisexed, on-the-Ring dwelling, nor the insistently tatty quaintness of a u-1 sector domicile, it was the most comfortable home he had visited on Tethys. All three visits, in fact had left him strangely relaxed and, strangely, depressed—but it had taken him three visits to realize they were two reactions.
Bron swallowed (and forgot) his next protest.
“We don’t have to get hysterical yet, I suppose,” Audri said. “It’s only eight percent—this time. And just for two weeks. They want to make everything look like its working at full capacity, only that people just all happen to be off doing something else.”
“What sort of logic—or metalogic—is that?”
“I have three degrees in this subject and am in the midst of getting another one—which is three more than you—and / don’t have the foggiest idea.” Audri leaned her palms on the desk edge. “Look. Just get out of here. If you come up with any more on Day Star this afternoon, shove it under Phil’s or my door. But don’t bother us. Okay? And don’t come in tomorrow.”
Wonderingly, he said (he hadn’t meant it to, but it sounded a little belligerent): “Okay ...” and returned to his office.
He thought many confused thoughts, and didn’t even bother to open the Day Star folder again.
The energy was gone by the time he returned to Serpent’s House. Sitting in the commons, alone in a conversation niche, he reread the flyer picked up that morning from the booster-booth’s floor:
“THESE THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN YOUR CITY!!!”
But, as he absorbed each political atrocity, he kept thinking of other things not happening in the city: like the performances of the little micro-theater troupe; and its director, who was no longer a resident. In a way he would not have dared define, it made the atrocities worse.
“You want to continue from where we left off?” Sam put the case up on the table and sat. “Lawrence said to set up the pieces as best we remembered, and he’d come down in ten minutes and make corrections.” Sam thumbed back brass claws, opened out the board.
Bron said: “Sam, how do you reconcile working for the government with the appalling political situation on Triton?”
Sam raised an eyebrow.
Between them micro-waves lapped, micro-breezes blew, micro-trees bent, and micro-torrents plashed and whispered down micro-rocks.
“I mean, there you are in the—what is it? Liaison Department? Political commitment isn’t a perimeter, Sam; it’s a parameter. Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you ever doubt?”
“What great metaphysical crisis have you just been through that’s suddenly gotten all your angst up?”
“We’re not talking about me. I asked you a question.” So as not to face the answer, Bron opened the case’s side drawer, removed the transparent plates of the astral cube and began to assemble them on their brass stilts. When he did glance up, Sam was regarding him seriously, the cards in his dark fingers halted in midshuffle. A corner of the White Novice showed, curved against Sam’s darkly pinkish palm.
“Yes.” The White Novice fell. “I doubt.” Fifty cards fell, riffling, after it. “Frequently.” For a moment, a little laughter shook, silent, behind Sam’s face; Sam’s eyes went back to the cards. He parted the pack, shuffled again.
“Come on. What do you doubt?”
“I doubt if someone like you could really be asking me a question like that for purely autonomous reasons.”
Bron pulled out the other side drawer of velvet-cradled ships, warriors, horsemen, herdsmen, and hunters. “There are no autonomous reasons. Whatever makes the question come up in my mind, the fact that it is in my mind is what makes it my question. It still stands.” He picked up the screen showing the horned head of Aolyon (cheeks puffed with hurricane winds) and set it, on its tiny base, upon the waters—which immediately darkened about it; green troughs and frothing crowns rolled about the little stretch of sea.
Sam put down the pack, reached into the control drawer and turned a survey knob. From the side-speaker came a crack and crackle over rushing wind, followed by a mumbling as of crumbled boulders. “That’s quite a storm ... were there any sea-monsters in there? I don’t remember—”
“What do you doubt?” Bron picked up his own scarlet Beast and set it on the rocky ledge, where it lowered over at the narrow trail winding the chasm below.
“All right.” Sam sat back to watch Bron set out tiny figures. “One thing I’ve been worrying about since the last evening we all played this game—”
“—the night of the gravity cut.” Bron thought: The night of the day I met her. He picked up green pieces and set them by river, rock, and road.
“At the Department, we knew something was going to happen that night. The cut wasn’t a surprise. I guess it was pretty clear to the rest of you, too, I wasn’t surprised ... But they told us only a few people would go out to see.”
Bron glanced up: Sam was turning a transparent die between dark forefinger and thumb.
“They had it all figured—statistics, trends, tendencies, and a really bizarre predictive module called the ‘hysteria index’ all said that practically no one would want to go out to see the sky ... As far as they can tell, eighty-six percent of Tethys’ population was outside within a minute and ten seconds, one way or the other, of the cut.”