Trouble on Triton Read online

  But the crowd had closed around the Poor Children. Had the harasser given up? Or been successful? Footsteps, voices, the roar of people passing blended with, and blotted out, the gentle roar of prayer.

  And he’d looked at, now . . . what?

  Four out of five? Those four were not very good choices for a reasonable and happy man. And who for the fifth?

  Six kaleidoscopically painted ego-booster booths (“KNOW YOUR PLACE IN SOCIETY,” repeated six lintels) sided the transport kiosk.

  Me? he thought. That’s it. Me.

  Something amusing was called for.

  He started toward the booths, got bumped in the shoulder; then forty people came out of the kiosk and all decided to walk between him and the booth nearest. I will not be deterred, he thought. I’m not changing my mind: and shouldered someone hard as someone had shouldered him.

  Finally, inelegantly, he grabbed a booth’s edge. The canvas curtain (silver, purple, and yellow) swung. He pushed inside.

  Twelve years ago some public channeler had made a great stir because the government had an average ten hours videotaped and otherwise recorded information on every citizen with a set of government credit tokens and/or government identity card.

  Eleven years ago another public channeler had pointed out that ninety-nine point nine nine and several nines percent more of this information was, a) never reviewed by human eyes (it was taken, developed, and catalogued by machine), b) was of a perfectly innocuous nature, and, c) could quite easily be released to the public without the least threat to government security.

  Ten years ago a statute was passed that any citizen had the right to demand a review of all government information on him or her. Some other public channeler had made a stir about getting the government simply to stop collecting such information; but such systems, once begun, insinuate themselves into the greater system in overdetermined ways: Jobs depended on them, space had been set aside for them, research was going on over how to do them more efficiently—such overdetermined systems, hard enough to revise, are even harder to abolish.

  Eight years ago, someone whose name never got mentioned came up with the idea of ego-booster booths, to offer minor credit (and, hopefully, slightly more major psychological) support to the Government Information Retention Program:

  Put a two-franq token into the slot (it used to be half a franq, but the tokens had been devalued again a year back), feed your government identity card into the slip and see, on the thirty-by-forty centimeter screen, three minutes’ videotape of you, accompanied by three minutes of your recorded speech, selected at random from the government’s own information files. Beside the screen (in this booth, someone had, bizarrely, spilled red syrup down it, some of which had been thumb-smudged away, some scraped off with a fingernail), the explanatory plaque explained: “The chances are ninety nine point nine nine and several nines percent more that no one but you has ever seen before what you are about to see. Or,” as the plaque continued cheerily, “to put it another way, there is a greater chance that you will have a surprise heart attack as you step from this booth today than that this confidential material has ever been viewed by other human eyes than yours. Do not forget to retrieve your card and your token. Thank you.”

  He had, for several weeks, worked at the public channels (as a copy researcher, while, in the evenings, he had been taking his metalogical training course) and, eight years ago, had been appalled at the booths’ institution. It was as if (he used to think, and had said a number of times, and had gotten a number of laughs when he said it) the Germans, during Earth’s Second World War, had decided to make Dachau or Auschwitz a paying tourist proposition before the War was over. (He had never been to Earth. Though he’d known a few who had.) But he had not made a stir; it had simply become another of the several annoyances that, to live in the same world with, had to be reduced to amusements. For two years, while finding the booths derisively amusing in theory, he had never gone into one—as silent protest. He had kept it up till he realized practically no one he knew ever went into them either: they considered the millions of people who did, over all the inhabited Outer Satellites, common, unthinking, politically irresponsible, and dull—which made it depressingly easy to define the people who did not use them, if only by their prejudices, as a type. He hated being a type. (“My dear young man,” Lawrence had said, “everyone is a type. The true mark of social intelligence is how unusual we can make our particular behavior for the particular type we are when we are put under particular pressure.”) So, finally (five years ago? No, six), he had entered one, put in his quarter-franq token (yes, it had been a quarter-franq back then) and his card, and watched three minutes of himself standing on a transport platform, occasionally taking a blue program folder from under his arm, obviously debating whether there was time to glance through it before the transport arrived, while his own voice, from what must have been a phone argument over his third credit-slot rerating, went back and forth from sullenness to insistence.

  He had been amused.

  And, oddly, reassured.

  (“Actually,” he’d said to Lawrence, “as a matter of fact I have been in them, a number of times. I rather pride myself on occasionally doing things contrary to what everyone else does.” To which Lawrence—who was seventy-four, homosexual, and unregenerate—had muttered at the vlet board, “That’s a type too.”)

  He took his card from the pouch on his loose, rope belt, found his two-franq token, and, with his thumb, pushed it into the slot, then fed the card into the slip.

  Across the top of the screen appeared his name:

  BRON HELSTROM

  and below that his twenty-two digit government identity number.

  The screen flickered—which it was not supposed to. A blur, filling the right half, rushed upward, froze a moment on the image of a door that someone (him?) was starting to open—then the blur rushed again, sliding (the heavy black border; the single bright line up the middle) across the screen; which meant the multitrack videotape had somehow lost sync. (When it happened on one of the public channel viewers at the co-op, it was quickly followed by a “We Regret That, Due to Technical Difficulties . . .” in quaint, 1980’s computer type.)

  Snap! from the speaker (which he assumed—though he had no reason to be sure—was a length of five-hundred micro-track videotape, somewhere in an Information Retention storage bank, breaking) turned the screen into colored confetti. The speaker grill hummed and chuckled, simultaneously and inanely.

  Broken?

  He looked at the card slip: How do I get my card out? he thought, a little panicky. Pry it out with my five-franq token? He couldn’t get it with a fingernail. Was the fault possibly here in the booth and not in the storage bank . . .?

  Indecision storming, he leaned against the booth’s back wall and watched storming dots. Once he bent and put his eye to the slip. A centimeter beyond the aluminum lips, the card edge, to some whirring timer, quivered like a nervous tongue.

  He leaned back again.

  After three minutes, the screen went gray; the speaker’s burr ceased.

  From the metal slip the card thrust (like a printed-over tongue, yes; with a picture of him in one corner). As he took it, thick wrists heavy with bracelets, that on a thinner wrist would have jangled (Lawrence had said: “Thick wrists are just not considered attractive right through here,” and sighed. Bron, finally, had smiled), he saw his reflection in the dead glass.

  His face (syrup spilled his shoulder), under pale, curly hair, was distraught. One eyebrow (since age twenty-five it had grown constantly, so that he actually had to cut it) was rumpled: his other he’d had replaced, when he was seventeen, by a gold arc set in the skin. He could have had it removed, but he still enjoyed the tribute to a wilder adolescence (than he would care to admit) in the Goebels of Mars’s Bellona. That gold arc? It had been a small if violent fad even then. Nobody today on Triton knew nor cared what it meant. Frankly, today, neither would most civilized Martians.

&n
bsp; The leather collar he’d had his design-rental house put together, with brass buckle and studs—which was just nostalgia for last year’s fashions. The irregular, colored web for his chest was an attempt at something original enough to preserve dignity, but not too far from this year’s.

  He was putting his card back into his purse when something clinked: his two-franq token had fallen into the return cup, reiterating what the booth itself had been placed there to proclaim: The government cared.

  He forefingered up the token (with the machine broken, he would not know if the two franqs had or had not been charged against his labor credit till he got to his co-op computer) and fisted aside the curtain. He thought:

  I haven’t really looked at my final person. I—

  The Plaza of Light was, of course, now almost deserted. Only a dozen people, over the concourse, wandered toward this or that side street. Really, there was just no crowd to pick a final person from.

  Bron Helstrom frowned somewhere behind his face. Unhappily, he walked to the corner, trying to repicture the colored dots fading into his syrup-edged reflection.

  The sensory shield (“It merely shields us from the reality of night;” again, Lawrence) flowed overhead, translating into visible light the radio-sky behind it.

  Neptune (as was explained on various tourist posters frequently and, infrequently, in various flimsies and fiche-journals) would not be that intense a turquoise, even on the translation scale; but it was a nice color to have so much of up there.

  Night?

  Neriad? From Triton, the other moon of Neptune never looked larger than a star. Once he’d read, in a book with old, bright pictures, “. . . Neriad has a practically sausage-shaped orbit . . .” He knew the small moon’s hugely oblate circuit, but had frequently wondered just what a sausage was.

  He smiled at the pink pavement. (The frown still hung inside, worrying at muscles which had already set their expression for the crowd; there was no crowd . . .) At the corner, he turned toward the unlicensed sector.

  It was not the direct way home; but, from time to time, since it was another thing his sort didn’t do, he would wander a few blocks out of his way to amble home through the u-l.

  At founding, each Outer Satellite city had set aside a city sector where no law officially held—since, as the Mars sociologist who first advocated it had pointed out, most cities develop, of necessity, such a neighborhood anyway. These sectors fulfilled a complex range of functions in the cities’ psychological, political, and economic ecology. Problems a few conservative, Earth-bound thinkers feared must come, didn’t: the interface between official law and official lawlessness produced some remarkably stable unofficial laws throughout the no-law sector. Minor criminals were not likely to retreat there: Enforcement agents could enter the u-l sector as could anyone else; and in the u-l there were no legal curbs on apprehension methods, use of weapons, or technological battery. Those major criminals whose crimes—through the contractual freedom of the place—existed mainly on paper found it convenient, while there, to keep life on the streets fairly safe and minor crimes at a minimum. Today it was something of a truism: “Most places in the unlicensed sector are statistically safer than the rest of the city.” To which the truistic response was: “But not all.”

  Still, there was a definite and different feel to the u-l streets. Those who chose to live there—and many did—did so because, presumably, they liked that feel.

  And those who chose only to walk? (Bron saw the arched underpass in the gray wall across the alley’s end.) Those who chose to walk there only occasionally, when they felt their identity threatened by the redundant formality of the orderly, licensed world . . .? Lawrence was probably right: They were a type too.

  The wall right of the arch was blank and high. In their frame, green numbers and letters for the alley’s coordinates glowed. Forty or fifty stories up, windows scattered irregularly. Level with him, someone had painted a slogan; someone else had painted it out. Still, the out-painting followed the letters enough to see it must have been seven . . . eight . . . ten words long: and the seventh was, probably, EARTH.

  The wall to the left was scaly with war posters. “TRITON WITH THE SATELLITE ALLIANCE!” was the most frequent, fragmented injunction. Three, pretty much unmarred, demanded: “WHAT ON EARTH HAVE WE GOT TO WORRY ABOUT!?!” And another: “KEEP TRITON UP AND OUT!” That one should be peeled down pretty soon, by whoever concerned themselves with poster peeling; as, from the scraps and shreds adangle, somebody must.

  The underpass was lit either side with cadaverous green light-strips. Bron entered. Those afraid of the u-l gave their claustrophobic fear of violence here (since statistics said you just wouldn’t find it inside) as their excuse.

  His reflection shimmered, greenly, along the tiles.

  Asphalt ground, grittily, under his sandals.

  An air convection suddenly stung his eyes and tossed paper bits (shreds from more posters) back along the passage.

  A-squint in the dying breeze, he came out in near darkness. The sensory shield was masked here, in this oldest sector of the city. Braces of lights on high posts made the black ceiling blacker still. Snaking tracks converged in gleaming clutches near a lightpost base, then wormed into shadow.

  A truck chunkered, a hundred yards away. Three people, shoulder to shoulder, crossed an overpass. Bron turned along the plated walkway. A few cinders scattered near the rail. He thought: Here anything may happen; and the only thing my apprehensiveness assures is that very little will . . .

  The footsteps behind only punctured his hearing when a second set, heavier and duller, joined them.

  He glanced back—because you were supposed to be more suspicious in the u-l.

  A woman in dark slacks and boots, with gold nails and eyes and a short cape that did not cover her breasts, was hurrying after him. Perhaps twenty feet away, she waved at him, hurried faster—

  Behind her, lumbering up into the circle of light from the walkway lamp, was a gorilla of a man.

  He was filthy.

  He was naked, except for fur strips bound around one muscular arm and one stocky thigh; chains swung from his neck before a furry, sunken chest. His hair was too fouled and matted to tell if it was dyed blue or green.

  The woman was only six feet off when the man—she hadn’t realized he was behind her . . .?—overtook her, spun her back by the shoulder and socked her in the jaw. She clutched her face, staggered into the rail and, mostly to avoid the next blow that glanced off her ear, pitched to her knees, catching herself on her hands.

  A-straddle her, the man bellowed, “You leave him—” jabbing at Bron with three, thick fingers, each with a black, metal ring—“alone, you hear? You just leave him alone, sister! Okay, brother—” which apparently meant Bron, though the man didn’t really look away from the top of the woman’s blonde head—“she won’t bother you any more.”

  Bron said: “But she wasn’t—”

  The matted hair swung. His face glowered: the flesh high and to the left of his nose was so scarred, swollen, and dirty, Bron could not tell if the sunken spot glistening within was an eye or an open wound. The head shook slowly. “Okay, brother. I did my part. You’re on your own, now . . .” Suddenly the man turned and lumbered away, bare feet thudding through the circle of light on the cindery plates.

  The woman sat back on the walkway, rubbing her chin.

  Bron thought: Sexual encounters are more frequent in the u-l. (Was the man part of some crazed, puritan sect?)

  The woman scowled at Bron; then her eyes, scrunching tighter, moved away.

  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, the u-l. 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-l), 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—?”