“I’m a metalogician,” Bron said. “I define and redefine the relation between P and Not-P five hours a day, four days a week. Women don’t understand. Faggots don’t understand either.”
Lawrence hefted up the vlet case, leaned against the wall, and raised an eyebrow. “Do explain.”
Bron hunched his shoulders. “Look, I ...” He straightened them. “It was something to do with, I don’t know, maybe a kind of bravery—”
“Bravery is just making a big thing about doing what’s best for the largest number of people. The only problem is that the same process by which we make a big thing out of it usually blinds us to seeing the num—
ber of people as large enough to be really worthwhile—”
“If you’re just going to stand there and say stupid things intended to be clever—” Bron was angry.
“You’re angry.” Lawrence hefted the case once more. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
Bron looked at his meshed fingers, the gold-and-black edging between them. “You know, Sam’s trip to Earth was basically a political mission. You can be glad you didn’t go. During it, some of us were captured. Some of us were killed. I got off easy. I was just tortured. They held me without food. I wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom. They stuck prongs in me. They beat me up, all the time asking the same questions again and again ... I know, it could have been worse. No bones broken; and, hell, I’m alive. But some of us ... aren’t. It wasn’t pleasant. The thing that really made it bad was that we weren’t even allowed to talk about any of it—by our side, either—to each other or to anyone else. Anything we might have said could have gotten one or all of us killed, just like that! And that’s when I ran into this—” He held up the crumpled letter, looked at his fist, let it drop—“woman. Of course, you’re right. She didn’t exist. The day after I got out, I took her out to dinner. It was so funny, sitting there in this incredibly expensive restaurant, where they still use money, that she’d wanted to go to—some friends of hers had been there already, and she was on her ear to try it out—and realize that a single word from me about any of what had just happened to me might have meant my death, or the death of a dozen others, or even hers, while all she was concerned with was that she’d bowed to the proper fashion—you’d have liked it; it’s one of those places where bare feet are de rigeur, but, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered—or that she was making the right impression on the waiters and the maiordomo, as a charming and naive innocent—that’s when she wamt prattling on about how marvelous this or that love affair had been. I mean, not that I should have been surprised. You know, I’d met her a few times before, here in Tethys. We’d even had sex a few times, casually and—well, I thought very successfullv. But fust an example: the first time I met her, I told her about you, said that she ought to meet you. She got very huffy about that; apparently she doesn’t like homosexuals. Doesn’t approve of them or something. She’s still going on about that in here—” Bron held up the letter. “Took great offence that I should think she would have anything to do with anyone who was. I mean, can you imagine? In this day and age—? Not that she isn’t above engaging in a little herself from time to time, and quite happily, or so she claims, when she lets her hair down. But, apparently, thafs different. Really, a logically consistent position is iust beyond her—though, like you, she talks about logic enough. Really, the only reason she gives for not wanting to know you is because I happened to mention you were gay! Take a look—” Bron held out the crumpled letter.
Lawrence raised his chin. “Really, you’re succeeding in making her sound like someone in whom I could not have the least interest—and certainly not in her scurrilous correspondence.”
Bron relocked his hands between his knees. “Well, that’s the type she is. Anyway, there we were, at the restaurant. It had been really rough on me, with the arrest and the interrogation. And I just felt I needed something—not sex; something more than that, some sort of ... I don’t know: support, friendship, warmth, compassion—though, believe me, once she got the slightest inkling I did want something more than sex, she decided sex was out as well. From then on it was just a big flat nothing. I mean, I couldn’t talk about what had happened to me, what I’d been through; it was just too dangerous. But she didn’t even have a clue that anything was even wrong. There was just no understanding at all ... They don’t understand. They can’t understand. Men just have to go through it alone.”
“You were saying something about bravery?” Lawrence hefted the case again.
“Well, yeah. I mean I don’t want to make a big thing of it; but, well, when I wanted to come back here, to check out you, and Audri and the kids, first I
had to break through an enforcement cordon. It wasn’t really that hard; I just mixed in with a crowd of the Poor Children of the Avestal Light and Changing Secret Name. Years ago I used to attend their instruction, so I could fake a mantra—well enough to got by, anyway. And I got through like that. I’m not saying it took a lot of ingenuity; but it took some. And in a time of social crisis, somebody’s got to have that kind of ingenuity, if just to protect the species, the women, the children—yes, even the aged. And that ingenuity comes out of the aloneness, that particular male aloneness. It’s not even conscious. I mean I wasn’t even trying that hard. But in time of crisis, some things just have to be done. Sometimes it’s keeping your mouth shut, or not doing something you want to that’ll endanger others. Sometimes it’s doing something you wouldn’t do normally, like breaking through an enforcement cordon, or a window, or even through somebody’s really dumb ideas.” Bron laughed. “I’m just trying to imagine that crazed bitch I was out to dinner with, with all that stuff about this lover or that—they included the two she had at the present—keeping her mouth shut about anything] A matter of life or death? That wouldn’t have stopped her! Or picking her way through the debris in the street out there. She’d have to spend a day deciding whether or not she had on the proper hiking clothes. Oh, I’m not saying women can’t be courageous. But it’s a different sort of—Well, I just guess women, or people with large female components to their personalities, are too social to have that necessary aloneness to act outside society. But as long as we have social crisis—whether they’re man-made ones like this war, or even natural ones like an ice-quake—despite what it says in the ice-operas, v/e need that particularly male aloneness, if only for the ingenuity it breeds, so that the rest of the species can survive. I suppose, in one sense, women are society. I mean, they Teptoduce it, don’t they? Or seventy percent of ft, today, anyway. Not that I begrudge them what, like you say, in the last hundred and seventy-five years they’ve been given—”
The vlet case slipped from Lawrence’s hands, crashed to the floor, and fell open. Two of the side drawers flew out, scattering over the rug cards, dice, and red and green figures.
Bron stood up.
Lawrence, with a small cry, fell to his knees, muttering, “Oh, really ...” and, “For crying out ...”, and went scrabbling after the pieces, looking more and more upset.
“Hey,” Bron said, after a moment, “don’t get so .. • Here, I’ll help you get—”
“You’re a fool,” Lawrence said, suddenly and hoarsely. “And I’m tired. I’m tired of it, that’s all there is. I’m tired.”
“Huh?”
Lawrence clacked two dice back in place, reached for a third—
“Hey ...” Bron heard the hostility in the clack and tried to retrace what he’d said to that point where it had been generated. “Oh, hey; when I said faggots didn’t understand, I was just being—I don’t know: bitchy. Look, whatever you like to screw or get screwed by, you’re still a man. You’ve been alone. After all, you live in this place, don’t you? You did just as much as I did to make sure Audri and the kids were all right. I mean it was really your idea to—”