Triton (Trouble on Triton) Read Free Page B

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, die u-1. 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-1), 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—?”
    “Metalogics,” she said, saving him. “Are you reading Ashima Slade?” who was the Lux University mathematician/philosopher who, some twenty-five years ago, had first published (at some ridiculous age like nineteen) two very thick volumes outlining the mathematical foundations of the subject. Bron laughed. “No. I’m afraid that’s a little over my head.” Once in the office library, he had actually browsed in the second volume of Summa Metalogiae (volume one was out on loan); the notation was differ—
    ent and more complicated (and clumsy) than that in use now; it was filled with dense and vaguely poetic meditations on life and language; also some of it was just wrong. “I’m in the purely practical end of the business.”
    “Oh,” she said. “I see.”
    “I’m not into the history of things, really.” He wondered where she’d heard of Ashima Slade, who was pretty esoteric, anyway. “I try to keep to the here and now. Were you ever into—”
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just making polite noise.” And while he wondered why she disapproved, she laughed again: “For a confused person, you’re very straightforward.”
    He thought: I’m not confused. He said: “I like straightforwardness when I find it.”
    They smiled at each other. (She thinks she’s not confused at all ...) And enjoyed her smile anyway.
    “What are you doing here?” Her new tone suggested she enjoyed it too. “You don’t live in here with us mavericks ... ?”
    “Just taking a shortcut home.” (Her raised eyebrow questioned.) “What were you doing? I mean, what was he doing ... ?”
    “Oh—” She made a face and shook her head. “That’s their idea of excitement. Or morality. Or something.”
    “Who’s