“Well ... thank you,” he said. “Thank you,” because he could think of nothing else to say.
“Tell me ...” And once more she leaned. “Isn’t ‘footmen’ a masculine word, though—I mean on Earth?”
Though he was no longer perspiring, he felt miserable. Her attempt at distraction merely goaded. Bron shrugged. “Oh, well ... isn’t ’e-girl’ a feminine one?”
“Yes,” she said, “but this is Earth, where such things traditionally—I’ve been led to understand—matter.”
He shrugged again, wishing that she would simply leave him alone. The footman returned, drinks on a mirrored tray.
He handed the Spike hers, took his. “Why don’t you let me pay as we go along,” he suggested.
“It would be just as convenient if you paid at the end,” the footman said, still smiling, but a little less. “Though if you’d prefer ... ?”
The Spike sipped. “From what we hear at home, convenience is supposed to be very important on Earth. Why don’t we do it that way?” Then she glanced at Bron; who nodded.
The footman nodded too—“Thank you—” and retired to her table.
Bron sipped the drink, whose flavor was all nostalgia, all memory, all of which announced so blaringly that it was not fifteen years ago (when he had last tasted it), that this was not Mars: that there were footwomen here instead of footmen; that convenience was the tradition (Then why, he wondered, momentarily angry, indulge an institution whose only purpose was inconvenient extravagance?), and that he was an uninitiate tourist.
No!
Play-acting it may be!
But that was a role he could not accept Both temperament and experience, however inadequate and outdated, denied it. He turned to the beaming Spike. “You still haven’t told me how the performance went this evening.”
“Ah ...” she said, leaning back and crossing her bare feet on the cushions before her, “the performance ... !”
Three times (Bron sat, dreading each one) the other three footmen offered them (the Spike liked Gold Flower Nectar—well, he liked it too. But that wasn’t the point) another drink, the second with the traditional nuts, the third with small fruits—olives, which he remembered as the hallmark of the best places. They offered three kinds, too: black, green, and yellow. He was impressed, which depressed him more. The client’s job was to impress, not be impressed. It was the client’s iob to supervise effects, to oversee, to direct the excellent performance. It was not, at this point anyway, her (or his) place to be carried away. With the next drink, they were offered a tray of small fish and meat delicacies, served on savory pastrv bases. With the last, thev were offered sweets, which Bron refused. “Afterwards,” he explained to her. “they’ll probably have some quite incredible confections, so we can pass these up in all good faith.”
She nodded appreciatively.
Then, there was light through the view window. Excitedly, the Spike leaned across him to look. The chamber began to jog and jerk. Abruptly the jerking ceased: they’d landed. The purple-pommed wall-ramp let down on its chains. Outside lights blazed in the distance and the darkness. The footmen rose to take their positions at the ramp’s four corners.
As they were walking between the first two, Bron said (In his mind he had gone over just how to say it several times): “/ think it was presumptuous to assume we were from Mars—or the Satellites. Or anyplace. How should they know, just from what we order, where we’re from?” He didn’t say it loudly. But he didn’t say it softly, either.
By the end of his statement, his glance, which had gone with calculated leisure around the night, reached the Spike—who was frowning. With folded arms, she slowed at the edge of the plush (by the last footman). “I suspect,” she said, with one slightly raised eyebrow, “it was because you called them ‘footmen.’ On the Explication de Tarif they’re called ‘hostesses.’
‘Footmen’ is probably the Martian term.”
Bron frowned, wondering why she chose that statement to slow down on. “Oh ...” he said, stepping from the end of the ramp, his eyes again going around the rocks, the railing, the waterfall. “Oh, well ... of course. Well, perhaps we’d better ...”
But the Spike, walking too, moved on a step ahead.
Beyond the red velvet ropes that railed the curving walk, rocks broke away, broke away further. Floodlights, lighting this tree or that bush, made the sky black and close as a u-1 ceiling.
“Isn’t it odd,” the Spike said, her statement oddly tangent to Bron’s thoughts, “you can’t tell whether it’s endless or enclosed—the whole space, I mean.”
Bron looked over another rail, where the torrents crashed. Above, was the moon. “I think ...” he said (she turned to look too), “it’s endless.”
“Oh, I didn’t even see that!” Her arm brushed his as she stepped around him to the rope. “Why it’s—”
“Look,” he said, not meaning the scenery. She looked back at him. “I think, convenience or no, I must pay them now—if only for the theater.” And before she could comment, or protest, he went back to the purple platform.
Bron stopped before the nearest, gold-skinned footman, his hand on his purse. “You served us that last drink, didn’t you?—and it was certainly a marvelous one, considering my thirst and the exhausting day I’ve had till now. Whatever it says on the menu ... ten, eleven? Twelve ♦ .. ?” (It had said eight-fifty.) He fingered into the drawn, leather neck—“Well, your smile alone made it worth half again that much.”—and pulled out two bills, the top one the twenty he’d expected. “Do you want it—?”
The footman’s gilded lids widened.
“Do you ... ?”
Separating the twenty off from the other bill (which was a thirty), Bron stepped up on the platform, held the bill high overhead. “Here it is, then—jump for it! Jump!”
The footman hesitated a moment, bit at her golden, lower lip, eyes still up, then leaped, grabbing Bron’s shoulder.
He let go of the bill. While it fluttered, he shrugged off her hand and stepped toward the next footman, the next bill in his fingers. “But you, my dear—” He felt ridiculous engaging in such banter, however formalized, with women—“you provided the first one, the one that relieved the parching thirst we arrived with. That alone triples the price! Here, my energetic one—” He held the note down beside his knee. “Do you want it? There it is. Crawl for it! Crawl ... !” He let the bill flutter to the ground, and turned again, as the woman dove after it. “And you two—” He pulled out two more bills, one in each hand—“don’t think I’ve forgotten the services you rendered. Yet ... somehow though I remember, I cannot quite distinguish them. Here is a twenty and a thirty. You may fight over which one of you deserves which.” He tossed the two bills up in the air, and stepped over one of the women who was already down on her knees, scrabbHng after one of the others. Behind him, he heard the second two start to go at it.
Bron stepped from the platform (cries; scufrlings; more cries behind him) and walked toward the Snike. She stood with palms pressed together at her chin, eyes wide, mouth opened—suddenly she bent with laughter.
Bron glanced back to where, on the pommed purple, the four footmen scuffled, laughing and pummeling one another.
“That’s ...” the Spike began, but broke up again. “That’s marvelous!”
Bron took her arm and turned her along the walkway.
Still laughing, she craned back to look. “If it wasn’t so perfect in itself, I’d use it in a production!” Her eyes came back to his. “I’d never have thought money could still do that ... ?”
“Well, considering the mythology behind it, and its rarity—”