Triton

“... at work next week!” Audri was calling across lots of heads and waving.

“Oh, yeah!” Bron waved back. “I’ll see you. At work.”

“Come on.” Lawrence said. “Please?” Bron started to sav something angrv. But it failed. “Sure.” Bron sighed. And after thev had walked through two and a half units: “This has been some vacation!”

The Spike’s (nonfacsimile) letter was waiting for him on his table.

In his clean room (the cupboard door was still open, but he was too tired to close it), he sat on his bed and reread it. Then he read it once more. Halfway through he realized he wasn’t even hearing it in the Spike’s voice, but in the voice of the woman at Audri’s co-op who had been calling instructions to the other women. He started again, this time hearing the accusations in the electronically strained tone of the hegemony’s Perso

“Hey,” Lawrence said, shouldering through the door, once more naked, carrying his cracked vlet case in both hands. “I’ve found almost all the pieces! Only four of them got stepped on, and I’m sure I can get another astral board from—”

“Lawrence?” Bron looked up from the black—and gold-edged flimsy. “Lawrence, you know, he was right?”

“This isn’t too bad, is it?” Lawrence ran a yellowish nail over the cracked inlay. “There used to be a marvelous craftsman over in the unlicensed sector who specialized in games. I’m sure she could fix this one good as new—if her place is still up. The public cha

“Lawrence he was right.”

“Who?” Lawrence looked up.

“That Christian—the one we saw out in front of Audri’s co-op. Mad Mike.”

“Right about what?”

“About women.” Bron suddenly crumpled the letter between cupped hands. “They don’t understand.”

“You mean thev don’t understand youl Some of us, my dear, get along smashingly with women. Even me, from time to time. No misunderstandings at all: just pure sympathy and sympatico riffht down the line. Of course with me it doesn’t last. But does it ever, all the time, with anvone?”

“They don’t understand about men—Not vou, Lawrence. I mean ordinary, heterosexual men. They can’t. It’s just a logical impossibility. I’m a logician and I know.”

Lawrence laughed. “Mv dear boy! I have observed you intimately now for six months, and vou are a sweet and familiar creature—alas, far more familiar than six months should make vou. Let me tell vou a secret. There is a difference between men and women, a little, tiny one that. I’m afraid, has probablv made most of your adult life miserable and will probably continue to make it so till you die. The difference is simnly that women have only really been treated, by that bizarre,

Derkheimian abstraction, ‘society,’ as human beings for the last—oh, say sixty-five years; and then, really, only on the moons; whereas men have had the luxury of such treatment for the last four thousand. The result of this historical anomaly is simply that, on a statistical basis, women are just a little less willing to put up with certain kinds of shit than men—simply because the concept of a certain kind of shit-free Universe is, in that equally bizarre Jungian abstraction, the female ‘collective unconscious,’ too new and too precious.” Lawrence’s brows knitted; he frowned at Bron’s knotted fists. “Why, I bet that’s a letter from a lady—I confess, when I was checking for corpses, I had a peek in here and saw the name and the return address. Your problem, you see, is that essentially you are a logical pervert, looking for a woman with a mutually compatible logical perversion. The fact is, the mutual perversion you are looking for is very, very rare—if not nonexistent. You’re looking for someone who can enjoy a certain sort of logical masochism. If it were just sexual, you’d have no trouble finding a partner at all—as your worldly experience no doubt has already informed you. Hang them from the ceiling, burn their nipples with matches, stick pins in their buttocks and cane them bloody! There’re gaggles of women, just as there are gaggles of men, who would be delighted to have a six-foot, blond iceberg like you around to play such games with. You can get a list of the places they frequent just by dialing Information. But, though she is a religious fanatic like Mad Mike, who believes that the children of her bodv are one with the objects of her hand, or a sociopath like poor Alfred, who doesn’t quite have a model for anyone, correct or incorrect; be she nun or nymphomaniac, a loud political pamphleteer ru

“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 di