Triton

Her smile was slightly reproving. “You have your own charm. And your numerous rough points ... But also charm.”

“Charm enough for you to come away with me forever?”

“Now it’s my turn to say, ‘Alas.’” She took the last of her broccoli between her teeth, drew the ivory sticks away. “No.”

He said: “You’ve never been in love, then. That’s it. Your heart is all stone. You’ve never had the heat of true passion melt it to life. Otherwise, you’d know I speak the truth and you’d surrender.”

“Damned if I do and damned if I don’t, huh?” She put down the chopsticks, picked up her fork, and cut at her beef. “Actually, I have been in love.”

“You mean with Windy and Charo?”

“No. With them I am merely happy—a state, by the way, I value very highly, ‘mere’ as it is.”

“Do you mean the lady you got refixated for, then?”

“No. Not even that. This was just a matter of the old, ordinary chemistry I was born with.” She ate another bite and, with foreknuckle, brushed away crumbs from her lower lip. “In fact, I think I’m going to tell you about it. I have, really, been in love. And what’s more, it was really and truly and dramatically unrequited. Yes, I am going to tell you. So just listen—I haven’t got it all rehearsed, now, so it’s going to come out very clumsily—who knows, even uglily. And I haven’t any idea if anything in it will mean anything to you. But I’m sure somewhere in it the right feeling, if not the right words, will be there. Like the Book of the Dead, or something: just read it once, and when you need it—when you can use it—you have to trust the necessary information will come back to you, if you just let it all flow through your ears even once. I used to teach—or rather, for the past few years because the company has been doing so well, we’ve been doing a sort of solstice seminar at Lux University. In theater. And I—”

The story was unclear. And clumsy. It had something to do with walking into her seminar room on the first evening, three years or five years ago, and seeing one student who was wearing only a fur vest and a knife—strapped to his foot; then there was something about a lot of drugs. He was either selling them or buying them ... Oh, yes, she had been struck practically inarticulate by him the moment she had walked into the room.

“Well, how did you teach the class then?’* Oh, she explained (in the middle of explaining something else), she was very good at that. (At what? but she was going on:) He and one of the other, older students, had asked her, after the class, to contribute a ru

“And that morning, he hugged me; and then he took me to the shuttle. And he gave me a notebook—the cover was blue plastic with the most amazing designs ru

As he watched the four men and three women walking, Bron suddenly frowned, sat slightly forward. “Do you know,” he said “—excuse me—but do you know that out of all the customers I’ve seen here, there isn’t one wearing shoes!”

The Spike frowned too. “Oh ... Well, yes. That’s the one concession Windy made to fashion, when he came here with Charo. In fact, just before I left, he reminded me to take mine off, in case this was where we were going—but really ...” Suddenly she giggled, drawing her own feet back under her chair (In his boots, Bron’s own toes began to tingle)—“they are terribly informal here. Windy said bare feet are ... well, encouraged—to enjoy the grass—but they really don’t care what you wear!”

“Oh.” Bron settled back; the majordomo came to flamb6 the bananas Foster—one red-gowned waiter pushed up a burning brazier, another a cart on which were the fruit, the brandies, the iced crime brulei. The various courses had actually been served by these high-coiffed and scarlet-gowned women. (They had women as waiters, too! And in a place like this!) During his first months on Triton, Bron had gotten used to people in positions of authority frequently of an unexpected sex. But people in positions of service were something else.

Butter frothed in the copper skillet. The domo ran his paring knife around a ring of orange rind, of lemon peel: in with the praline, the sugar; then the deft stripping of the white bananas, peel already baked black; and, after a sprinkling of brandies and a tilting of the pan, a whoooshl of flame.