Triton (Trouble on Triton) (4 page)

The dark-haired girl, pulling up the cloth case around her instrument, paused, smiled at Bron, then zipped it closed.

“The backdrop and costumes were by Dian—”

Who was apparently the hairy woman lugging the rolled mural over her shoulder: before she turned off down the alley, she gave him a grotesque, one-eyed grin.

“Our special effects were all devised by our tumbler, Windy—but I think he’s already getting set up at the next location. The solo voice that you first heard singing was recorded by Jon-Teshumi.”

One of the women held up what he realized was a small playback recorder.

“The production was coordinated by our manager, Hatti.”

“That’s me too,” the woman with the recorder said, then hurried after the others.

“And the entire production—” The guitarist (Charo?) spoke now, from the corner—“was conceived, written, produced, and directed by the Spike.” The guitarist grinned.

The Spike grinned—“Thank you, again—” and, with an arm around the guitarist’s shoulder, they were around the corner.

“It was great!” he called after them. “It was really—” He looked about the empty square, at the poster-splotched wall, at the other streets. Which way
had
he come? The emotion Bron had been fighting down suddenly surged. He did not shout out,
No
—! He lunged instead for the low archway and loped into the alley.

He had already turned at two intersections when his mind was wrenched away from what was going through
it
by the shambling figure that, thirty yards ahead, crossed from corner to corner, glanced at him—the eye; the chains; the sunken chest; the high coordinate lights made a red snarl of the hairy shoulder: this time it
was
the gorilla-ish man—and was gone.

At the corner, Bron looked but couldn’t see him. Were the Dumb Beasts, he wondered suddenly, also part of the charade? Somehow, the possibility was appalling. Wander around the u-1 until he found him? Or some other member of the sect? Or of the cast? But if the initial encounter
had
been theatrical prologue, how would he know the answer he got were not some equally theatrical coda? Meaningless communication? Meaningful ... ? Which one had she said?

He turned, breathed deeply, and hurried left—sure he was going wrong; till he came out on the familiar, plated walkway, three intersections down from where he’d entered.

And what
had
been going through his mind?

Mimimomomizolalilamialomuelarmronoriminos
... And ‘mu’ and ‘ro’
were
the thirteenth and seventeenth syllables! From out memory’s detritus they had reachieved their places, fixed and certain. Was it the brief drug? Or some resonance from the theater piece? Or simply chance? Walking slowly, strangely pensive, he reviewed the mumble again. In the swing between pleasantry and unpleasantness, the Spike’s laugh returned, either as something that effected, or that was, the transition. The mumble rolled about his mind.

Then Bron frowned.

The
third
syllable ... and what about the ninth? With sure memory of the thirteenth and seventeenth, another came that he had not reviewed for years: The Instructor, at the last meeting of the Poor Children he had attended, had stood by his bench, correcting his pronunciation of those two syllables again and again and again and again and again and saying, finally, “You still don’t have them right,” and proceeded to the next novice. The class had recited the mumble, several more times, in unison: he
had
been able to hear that his own vowels, for those syllables, three and nine, were, indeed, off. Finally, he had looked at his lap, slurred over the whole thing; and hadn’t come to the next session. The truth, undercutting present pleasure—
the
new feeling (the Spike’s face flickered a moment, in memory, laughing) was somehow part of the first negative one he had tried to suppress back at the little
square (the No
—! he hadn’t shouted)—was that, having nothing to do with the thirteenth syllable, or the seventeenth, or the third, or the ninth, he had never, really, known the mantra.

All he had (once more the syllables began to play through) was something with which he could, as he had done with so much of his life, make do.

The realization (it wasn’t the drug; it was just the way things were) shivered his vision with leftover tears that—no,
that
wasn’t what she’d laughed at ... ?—he blinked, confusedly, back.
2. Solvable Games

The death at the center of such discourse is extraordinary and begins to let us see our own condition.

—Robin Blaser, Th
e Practice of Outside

Bronze clasps, cast as clawing beasts, snapped back under Lawrence’s wrinkled thumbs. Lawrence opened out the meter-wide case.

“What I mean,” Bron said, as the case’s wooden back, inlaid with ivory and walnut, clacked to the common-room’s baize table, “is, how are you even supposed to know if you
like
something like that ...

?” He gazed over the board: within the teak rim, in three dimensions, the landscape spread, mountains to the left, ocean to the right. The jungle between was cut here by a narrow, double-rutted road, there by a mazy river. A tongue of desert wound from behind the steeper crags, alongside the ragged quarry. Drifting in from the border, small waves inched the glassy sea till, near shore, they broke, foaming. Along the beach, wrinkling spume slid up and out, up and out. “Do you see?” Bron insisted. “I mean, you understand my point?” The river’s silver, leaving the mountains, poured over a little waterfall, bright as falling mica. A darker green blush crossed the jungle: a micro-breeze, disturbing the tops of micro-trees.

“There was this man, you see, from some sect she called the Dumb Beasts—I mean, if there
is
such a sect. But considering all that happened, how do you tell if any of it was real? / don’t know how big their endowment was ... and maybe the ‘endowment’ was part of the theater’ too.”

“Well, her
name
is certainly familiar—”

“Is it?” Bron asked in the quiet commons. “The Spike?”

“Very.” Lawrence assembled the astral cube: the six six-by-six plastic squares, stacked on brass stilts, made a three dimensional, transparent playing space to the right of the main board, on which all demonic, mythical, magical, and astral battles were enacted. “You don’t follow such things. I do. I even think I’ve heard something about the Dumb Beasts—they’re the fragments of some bizarre sect that used to go by just a very long number?”

“She told me some nonsense like that.”

“I can’t remember
where
I heard about them—that’s not the sort of thing I do follow—so I can’t swear to the validity of your beasts for you. But the Spike, at any rate, is quite real. I’ve always wanted to see one of her productions. I rather envy you—There: That’s all together. Would you get the cards out of the side drawer, please?”

Bron looked around the side of the vlet case, pulled out the long, narrow drawer. He picked up the tooled leather dice-cup; the five dice clicked hollowly. Thrown, three would be black with white pips, one transparent with diamond pips, and the fifth, not cubic, but scarlet and icosahedral, had seven faces blank (Usually benign in play, occasionally they could prove, if you threw one at the wrong time, disastrous); the others showed thirteen alien constellations, picked out in black and gold. Bron set the cup down and fingered up the thick pack. He unwrapped the blue silk cloth from around it. Along the napkin’s edge, gold threads embroidered:

—the rather difficult modulus by which the even more difficult scoring system (Lawrence had not taught him that yet; he knew only that
0
was a measurement of strategic angles of attack [over different sorts of terrain N, M, and A] and that small ones netted more points than large ones) proceeded. As he pulled back the blue corner, two cards slid to the table. He picked them up—the Wizard of Rocks and the Child Empress—and squared them with the deck. “Lawrence, the point is, even if he wasn’t a member of their company—I mean, there was a woman member of the sect who definitely
was
with them—unless that was just makeup too. It was as though, suddenly, I couldn’t trust anything ...”

Lawrence opened the drawer on the other side of the case and took out a handful of the small, mirrored and transparent screens (some etched with the same, alien constellations, some with different), set them upright beside the board, then reached back in for the playing pieces: carved foot soldiers, mounted men, model army-encampments; and, from this same drawer, two miniature cities, with their tiny streets, squares, and markets: one of these he put in its place in the mountains, the second he set by the shore. “I don’t see why you’re so busy dissecting all this—” Lawrence took up one red foot soldier, one green one, sat back in his chair, put the pieces behind his back—“when it seems to me all that’s happened is, in an otherwise dull day, you’ve had—from the way you described it—something of an aesthetic experience.” (Bron was thinking that seventy-four-year-olds should either get bodily regeneration treatments or not sit around the co-op common rooms stark naked—another thought he decided to suppress: it was Lawrence’s right to dress or not dress any way he felt like. But why, he found himself wondering, was it so easy to suppress some negative thoughts while others just proliferated?—like all those that had been forming
about that
theater woman, the Spike: which, essentially, was what he had been avoiding talking about for the last quarter of an hour.) Lawrence said:

“If you were asking for advice, which you’re not, I’d say why don’t you just leave it at that. If you don’t mind comments, which I must assume you don’t, because despite all my other comments, you’re still talking to me and haven’t merely wandered away—” Lawrence brought his fists together above the mountains—“I can only suspect that, because you
haven’t
left it at that—the only logically tenable conclusion—there probably
is
more to it than that. At least as far as you’re concerned. Choose—”

Bron tapped Lawrence’s left fist.

The fist (Bron thought: Perhaps it’s simply because Lawrence is my friend) turned over, opened: a scarlet foot soldier.

“That’s you,” Lawrence said.

Bron took the piece, looked around at the other side of the case, and began to pick the scarlet pieces from their green velvet drawer. He stopped with the piece called the Beast between his thumb and forefinger, regarded it: the miniature, hulking figure, with its metal claws and plastic eyes, was not particularly dumb: during certain gambits, the speaker grill beside the dice-cup drawer would yield up the creature’s roar, as well as the terrified shouts of its attackers. Bron turned it in his fingers, pondering, smiling, wondering what else he might say to Lawrence other than “yes”—

“Freddie,” Lawrence said to the naked ten-year-old, who had wandered up to the table to stare (his head was shaved; his eyes were blue, were wide; he wore myriad bright-stoned rings, three, four, and five to a finger; and he was sucking the fore and middle-ones; the skin at one corner of his mouth was bright with saliva),
“what
are you staring at?”

“That,” Freddie said around his knuckles, nodding at the board.

“Why don’t you guys go to a nice, mixed-sex co-op, where there may be a few other children and, maybe, other people to take care of you?”

“Flossie likes it here,” Freddie said. His cheeks went back to their slow pulsing as Flossie (a head

[also shaved] and a half taller, eyes as wide [and as blue], hands heavy with even more rings) came up to stand just behind Freddie’s shoulders.

Flossie stared.

Freddie stared.

Then Flossie’s brightly-ringed hand pulled Freddie’s from his mouth. “Don’t do that.”

Freddie’s hand went down long enough to scratch his stomach, then came back up: two wet fingers, a near dozen rings between them, slid back into his mouth.

Six months ago, Bron had just assumed that the two, who lived in adjacent rooms at the end of his corridor, were lovers; later, he’d decided they were merely brothers. Lawrence, with his ability to ferret out the gossipy truth, had finally revealed the story: Flossie, who was twenty-three and Freddie’s father, was severely mentally retarded. He had brought his ten-year-old son with him from a Cailisto-Port commune because there was a very good training and medical institute for the mentally handicapped here in Tethys. (The gemstones in those rings were oveonic, crystalline memory units, which, while they did not completely compensate for Flossie’s neurological defects, certainly helped; Flossie wore different rings for different situations. Freddie wore the rest. Bron had noticed Flossie often switched off with his son.) Who, or where, a mother was, neither seemed to care or know. From commune to co-op and back again, Flossie had raised Freddie since infancy. (“And
he’s
rather bright,” Lawrence had commented, “though with that finger-sucking, I think he suffers socially.”) Their names had been Lawrence’s idea (“An arcane literary reference as far beyond you as it is beyond them,” Lawrence had explained when Bron had requested explanation), codified when the two had started using them themselves. All right, what
were
their real names, then? someone had asked. Save their twenty-two digit government identity numbers, no one (they explained), had ever bothered to suggest any before which they particularly liked (“Which,” said Lawrence, “is merely a comment on the narrowness of the worldlets we
live
among.”).

“Now if you two want to watch,” Lawrence said, “you go over
there
and sit down. Standing up close like
that
and leaning over our shoulders will just make me nervous.”

Flossie put a glittering hand on Freddie’s shoulder: they went, sat, and stared. Looking back at the board, Bron tried to remember what it was he had been about to answer ‘yes’—

“No—!”

Bron and Lawrence looked up.

“Here I am, running my
tail
off to get to this Snake Pit in time, and there
you
two are, already frozen in!” From the balcony, Sam leered hugely, jovially, and blackly over the rail. “Well! What can you do?