Bron asked: “I’m terribly sorry—but are you into prostitution?”
She looked at him again, sharply, started to say one thing, changed to another, finally settled on, “Oh, Jesus Christ,” then went back to fingering her jaw.
Bron thought: The Christians aren’t making another comeback ... ? He asked: “Well, are you all right?”
She shook her head in a way that did not, he decided, mean specifically negation. (As her exclamation, he decided, did not specifically mean Christianity.) She stuck out a hand.
He looked at it a moment (it was a hand wide as his own, with pronounced ligaments, the skin around the gold nails rough as some craftsman’s): she wanted help up.
He tugged her to her feet, noting as she came, unsteadily, erect that she was generally big-boned and rather awkward. Most people with frames like that—like himself—tended to cultivate large muscles (as he had done); she, however—common in people from the low-gravity Holds or the median-gravity Keeps—hadn’t bothered.
She laughed.
He looked up from her hips to find her looking at him, still laughing. Something inside pulled back; she was laughing at him. But not like the craftsman at the mumblers. It was rather as if he had just told her a joke that had given her great pleasure. Wondering what it was, he asked:
“Does it hurt?”
She said, thickly, “Yes,” and nodded, and kept laughing.
“I mean I thought you might be into prostitution,” Bron said. “Rare as it is out here—” which meant the Outer Satellites—“it is more common here—” which meant, die u-1. He wondered if she understood the distinction.
Her laugh ended with a sigh. “No. I’m into history, actually.” She blinked.
He thought: She disapproves of my question. And: I wish she would laugh again. And then: What did I do to make her stop laughing?
She asked: “Are you into prostitution?”
“Oh, not at ...” He frowned. “Well, I guess—but do you mean buying or ... selling?”
“Are you into either one?”
“Me? Oh, I ...” He laughed now. “Well, actually, years ago, you see, I was—when I was just a teenager ... um, selling—” Then he blurted: “But that was in Bellona. I grew up on Mars and ...” His laugh became an embarrassed frown; “I’m into metalogics now—” I’m acting like I live here (which meant the u-1), he thought with distress; it was trying not to have it appear he lived outside. But why should he care about—? He asked: “But why should you care about—?”
“Metalogics,” she said, saving him. “Are you reading Ashima Slade?” who was the Lux University mathematician/philosopher who, some twenty-five years ago, had first published (at some ridiculous age like nineteen) two very thick volumes outlining the mathematical foundations of the subject.
Bron laughed. “No. I’m afraid that’s a little over my head.” Once in the office library, he had actually browsed in the second volume of Summa Metalogiae (volume one was out on loan); the notation was differ—
ent and more complicated (and clumsy) than that in use now; it was filled with dense and vaguely poetic meditations on life and language; also some of it was just wrong. “I’m in the purely practical end of the business.”
“Oh,” she said. “I see.”
“I’m not into the history of things, really.” He wondered where she’d heard of Ashima Slade, who was pretty esoteric, anyway. “I try to keep to the here and now. Were you ever into—”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just making polite noise.” And while he wondered why she disapproved, she laughed again: “For a confused person, you’re very straightforward.”
He thought: I’m not confused. He said: “I like straightforwardness when I find it.”
They smiled at each other. (She thinks she’s not confused at all ...) And enjoyed her smile anyway.
“What are you doing here?” Her new tone suggested she enjoyed it too. “You don’t live in here with us mavericks ... ?”
“Just taking a shortcut home.” (Her raised eyebrow questioned.) “What were you doing? I mean, what was he doing ... ?”
“Oh—” She made a face and shook her head. “That’s their idea of excitement. Or morality. Or something.”
“Who’s ‘they?’”
“The Rampant Order of Dumb Beasts. Another neo-Thomist sect.”
“Oh?”
“They sprang up about six weeks back. If they keep sprung for another, I may move back into your side of town. Well, I suppose—” She shrugged—“they have their point.” She swiveled her jaw from side to side, touched it with her fingertips.
“What are they into?”
“Putting an end to meaningless communication. Or is it meaningful ... ? I can never remember. Most of them used to belong to a really strict, self-mortification and mutilation sect—you saw that eye? They disbanded when some of the shamans managed to do them—
selves in by particularly lingering and unpleasant means. They’d completely given up on verbal communication; and two of the leading-lady gurus—as well as one of the gentlemen—had their brains publicly burned out. It was pretty grim.”
“Yes,” he said, on the verge of giving a small, sympathetic shudder. But she didn’t. So he didn’t.
“Apparently, some of the former members who survived—they didn’t even allow themselves a name, back then; just a number: a very long, random one, I believe—have gotten together again around more or less similar principles, but with a, I guess you could call it, more relaxed interpretation: The Order of Dumb Beasts ...” She shook her head. “The fact that they do talk, you see, is supposed to be a very subtle sort of irony. It’s the first time they’ve bothered me. They are a nuisance—next time, I just may nuisance back!”
“I can imagine,” he said, searching for some point in the unpleasantness to take the conversation on. He found none and floundered, silently. She saved him again with: “Come walk with me,” and smiled, beckoning with her head.
Smiling back, he ducked his in relief; and came. Seconds later, she turned (on a turning he had often seen and never thought about), then glanced back at him again.
He said: “Have you noticed? To meet a new person here in Tethys is always like entering a new city ... ?” He’d said that before, too.
In the narrow way, gray walls either side (under the black ceiling), she glanced at him, considering.
“At least, it’s always been that way with me. A new friend, and they invariably have an appointment or another friend on some street you’ve never been on before. It makes the city—come alive.”
Her new smile mocked slightly. “I would have thought to someone like you all places in the city looked alive,” and she turned down an even narrower alley.
He glanced at the glowing, red (for the u-1) numbers of the street’s coordinates up on the wall, follow—
ing. Then the thought, But why am I following? overtook him. To dispel it, he overtook her.
The young man Bron had hardly noticed leave the archway ahead suddenly turned his back to them, crouched, then leaped, flinging his arms, and his hair, up and over; feet—red socks flashed between frayed cuffs and fringed shoes—swung through air and over, after hands: coppery hair swept the ground. Then he was right side up. Then another back-flip. Then another. Then he bounced, whirling, arms out for a brief bow. Shirtless, in tattered pants, panting a little, with hair hanging over his shoulders, straggling across his face, he (a lot cleaner than the gorilla Bron had just rescued her from) grinned.
And she, again, was smiling: “Oh, come on! Let’s follow fom!”
“Well, if you—” He still wondered why he was following her.