She turned.
“Beautiful!” Philip exclaimed, a grin splitting his beard’s knap. “Audri told me, but of course I wouldn’t believe it till I saw—” Philip made a gesture with the backs of both hirsute hands toward Bron’s breasts. “Gorgeous .... ! This is permanent, now?”
“Yes,” Bron said, wishing they were not in the middle of the floor.
“Here,” Philip said. “Let’s get out of the middle of the floor,” and put his hand on Bron’s shoulder again, which Bron wished he wouldn’t do, to guide her over to the booths. But then Philip was touch-ish with all the female employees, Bron had noted before, sometimes with envy, sometimes with annoyance. (He was touch-ish with the male employees too, which, before, had just been annoying.) “And this ... um, goes all the way down?” Philip asked.
Bron did not quite sigh. “That’s right.”
“Just marvelous.” Philip dropped his hand but craned around to stare. “I can’t get over those tits! I’m green with jealousy!” He covered his slightly loose pectoral with spread fingers. (Philip had come in naked today.) “I have to make do with one; and then it’s just up and down like a leaky balloon. Bron, I want you to know I’m really impressed. I think you’ve probably found yourself. Finally. I think you just may have. It’s got that feeling about it, you know—”
Bron was about to say, Shove it, Philip, will you? when Audri said:
“Hey, there. Is Philip ragging you? Why don’t you lay off Bron, and let her get her lunch, huh?”
“Yeah,” Philip said. ‘“Sure. Get your lunch. We’re sitting right over there.” He gestured at a booth somewhere beyond the blackened disaster. “See you when you get back.”
As she moved through the line, Bron remembered her thought with Lawrence: A11 men have some rights, and considered it against her annoyance with Philip. Philip was certainly closer to the type of man she’d set herself to be interested in than, say, Lawrence. What, she wondered, would Philip be like in bed? The blus-teriness would transform to firmness. The honesty would become consideration. Philip (she considered, with distaste) would never think of lying on top of someone lighter than he was without invitation. And he would have some particularly minor kink (like really getting off on licking your ear) which he’d expect you to cooperate with and be just annoyingly obliging about cooperating with any of yours. In short, what she knew from the information left over from that other life: Philip was as sexually sure of himself as Bron had been. She had recognized it before. She recognized it now. And Philip was still (with his hand on the shoulder and his unstoppable frankness) the most annoying person she knew—plurality female configuration or not, she thought grimly. It was not that she felt no attraction; but she could certainly understand how, with men like Philip around, you could get to not like the feeling.
“Excuse me ... ?” someone said.
She said: “Oh, I’m so ...” and took her tray and started around the cafeteria.
She saw their booth, went toward it.
As she neared, she was sure she heard Philip say:
“... still doesn’t like to be touched,” and thought, as she took her place across from him, I didn’t hear the pronoun, but if I had and it was ‘he,’ I’d kill him. But the conversation was on Day Star and how the war seemed to have improved the personalities of two of the representatives, and what had happened to the third? No, he wasn’t a war casualty, that much had been established. (And wasn’t Lux just terrifying? Five million people!) One of the junior programmers said morosely: “I used to live in Lux,” which, even for a u-l’er, was incredibly gross. About the table, people’s eyes caught one another’s, then dropped to their trays, till someone picked up the conversation’s thread: But he had disappeared ... In the midst of these speculations, Philip leaned his elbows on the table and asked: “Say, where’re you living now?”
Bron told him the name of the women’s co-op.
“Mmm,” Philip said, and nodded. “I was just thinking, back when I was married—my second marriage, actually—my second wife was a transexual ... ?”
“When were you married?” asked the junior programmer, who wore a silver body-stocking from head to toe, with large black circles all over, and sat wedged in by the wall. “You’re not an earthie. They don’t even do that too much on Mars, now.”
The programmer, Bron realized. She was probably from Mars.
“Oh, I used to spend quite a bit of time in your u-1; you can make any kind of contract you want there: that’s why we’ve got it ... But that was back when I was a very dumb, and very idealistic kid. Like I was saying, my wife had started out as a man—”
“How’d she stack up to old Bron here?” the programmer asked.
“I pretend to be crude,” Philip said, leaning forward and speaking around Audri, “but you really are! She was great—” He settled back. “The marriage, however, was three or four times as bad as absolutely any sociologist I’d ever read on the subject said it would be, back when I was a student at Lux. And you know, I still had to do it two more times before I learned my lesson? But I was young then—that was my religious phase. Anyway; after we broke up and she left the mixed co-op where we were living, she moved into a straight, women’s co-op for a while—I mean, she was about as heterosexual as you can get, which may have been part of the problem, but nevertheless: then she moved into another women’s co-op that was nonspecific. I remember she said she thought it was a lot nicer—I mean, as far as she was concerned. They were a lot more accepting of general, nonsexual eccentricities and things like that, you know? It was a place called the Eagle, if I remember. It’s still going. If you have any problems with your place, you might bear it in mind.”
“I will,” Bron said.
The next day another memo came down from the Art Department. It seemed that, independently, twenty-seven people had come up with the suggestion that the memorial, in its new version, be titled The Horrors of War and so displayed in the hegemony museum. This suggestion had been duly passed on to the sculptor, in the hospital, who was apparently in touch enough to make the following reply: “No\ Nol
Flatly and bluntly No\ Title too banal for words! Sorry, art just does not work that way! (If you must name it something, name it after the last head of your whole, ugly operation!) It is my job to make works that you may get anything out of you wish. It is not my job to teach you how to make them! Leave me alone. You have done enough to me already.” And so Tristan and Iseult: A War Memorial was transferred upstairs, where from time to time Bron, on her way to the office library, stopped in to see it among the other dozens of works on exhibit. The burned and broken bits were all in a large carton near one base, where they gazed up at her like ashy skulls in which you could not quite find the eyes.
Bron kept the memo in her drawer. She cut the words of the old sculptor out of the flimsy to take home and hang on her wall. They had struck some chord; it was the first thing in her new life that seemed to indicate that there might be something to live for in the world besides being reasonable or happy. (Not that it was art—any more than it was religion!) And two weeks later, with Lawrence carrying the smaller packages, Bron moved from the straight Cheetah into the unspecified Eagle.
“Oh, this is much nicer,” Lawrence said, when they finally got things organized in the room. “I mean, everybody seems so much more relaxed here than back at the place I got for you.”
“As long as they don’t try to be so damned friendly,” Bron said, “and stay out of my hair, it’s got to be an improvement.”