Somehow, twenty minutes after that, the pieces had been rearranged on the vlet board; some dozen people were back at the various readers around the room, and several others (among them Sam) had taken Alfred to the console room where the co-op’s outlet for the city information computer would give him a medical diagnosis and any necessary referrals. Then someone came back to report, with astonishment, that there would be a seven-to-ten-minute wait for processing of all medical programs due to a city overflow! “I guess a lot of people sprained a lot of ankles ...” was someone’s dubious comment. Bron decided to go down and see for himself. Downstairs, he crowded into a room with several others. Between two shoulders, he could see the screen flashing: “There will be a three-minute delay before we can ...” Now that was unsettling. But other than a bloody nose and scared, Alfred seemed all right. While Bron was there, the delay sign was replaced with the usual: “Your diagnosis will begin in one minute. Please prepare to answer a few simple questions.” So while Alfred, one knuckle pressed against his upper lip, was sitting down to the console, Bron and several others had come back to the commons.

He lost the astral battle seven to one.

“What,” Lawrence said, sitting back in his chair, “were you ever thinking of?”

Bron reached out and removed his own, overturned, scarlet Assassin and slid Lawrence’s green Duchess into the square by the waterfall’s bank, to threaten the caravan preparing to cross the river less than three squares to the East. With the piece still in his fist (he could feel its nubs and corners), he picked up his cards and surveyed his depleted points. “That woman.” Only one meld was possible and he was three away from his most recent bid.

Lawrence laughed, sat back, and turned his own cards down on his bony knee. “You mean to tell me, in the middle of all this excitement, you’re thinking about some woman? If you’re that kind, what are you doing in this co-op? There’re plenty of places set up for you oversexed, libidinous creatures. Most of them, in fact. Why do you want to come here and let your nasty id mess up our ascetic lives?”

“The first time I ever saw you,” Bron said, “you lumbered into me in the upstairs corridor, drunk out of your mind, and demanded I screw you on the spot.”

“I remember it well.” Lawrence nodded deeply. “The next time I get drunk, I may do the same: There’s life in the old pirate yet—the point, however, is that when you refused, saying that you just weren’t (as you put it so diplomatically) all that turned on by men, I did not immediately drop you from my acquaintanceship; I did not snub you in the dining area next time we passed. I even, if I recall, said hello to you the next morning and volunteered to let the repairmen in to fix your channel circuit while you were out at work.”

“What is the point, Lawrence?” Bron looked back at his cards. Several times in his life, people had pointed out to him that what friends he had tended to be people who had approached him for friendship, rather than people he’d approached. It meant that a goodly percentage of his male friends over the years had been homosexual, which, at this stage, was simply a familiar occurrence. “You’re the libidinous one. I admit it, my relationships with women have never been the best—though, by the gods of any sect you name, sex itself never seemed to be the problem. But that’s why I moved in here: to get away from women and sex.”

“Oh, really! Alfred rushing his little girl friends in here after midnight and hustling them out again before dawn—it may be screwing, but it isn’t sex. And anyway, it doesn’t bother anyone, though I’m sure it would just destroy him if he found that out.”

“Certainly doesn’t bother me,” Bron said. “Or you hustling your little boyfriends in and out—”

“Wishful thinking! Wishful thinking!” Lawrence closed his eyes lightly and raised his chin. “Ah, such wishful thinking.”

“If I remember correctly,” Bron said, “that evening in the corridor, when I said ‘no,’ you called me a faggot-hater and demanded to know what I was doing in an all-male co-op if I didn’t like to go to bed with men—”

Lawrence’s eyes opened; his chin came down. “—whereupon you politely informed me that there was a gay—you know, politically that has, from time to time, been a very nasty word, till that silly public-channel series denatured it once and for all back in the Seventies, the same one which reestablished ‘into’ into the language—men’s co-op two streets away that might take me in for the night. Bastard!”

“You kept on insisting I screw you.”

“And you kept on insisting that you didn’t want to go to bed with anybody, in between explaining to me, in the most sophomoric manner, that I couldn’t expect this kind of commune to be more than twenty percent gay—where you got that dreadfully quaint statistic from, I’m sure / shall never know; then you went on to explain that, nevertheless, due to your current disinterest in women you felt yourself to be politically homosexual—”

“At which point you said you couldn’t stand political homosexuals. Lawrence, what is the point?”

“And I still can’t. The point is merely—” Lawrence returned his eyes to the board: in the Mountains of Norhia a situation had been developing for some time that Bron had hoped would turn to his advantage, if Lawrence would only keep the transparent screens of Egoth and Dartor out of it: the Mountains of Norhia were where Lawrence was looking—“that my feelings toward you, later that night as I lay awake in alcoholic overstimulation, tossing and turning in my narrow bed where you had so cavalierly dumped me and left, were rather like you have been avoiding describing your feelings toward that woman.”

“I thought you passed out—” Bron’s eyes went from the board to Lawrence’s. “Pardon me?”

“I said, right after you so considerately put me to bed—I mean I suppose you could have left me lying on the hall floor; passed out? Ha!—I felt about you rather like you feel about her. I hated you, I thought you were hardhearted, insensitive, ungenerous and pignoli-brained; and quite the most beautiful, dashing, mysterious, and marvelous creature I’d ever laid eyes on.”

“Just because you wanted to ... ?” Bron frowned. “Are you suggesting that / want to—... with her?”

“I am simply noting a similarity of reactions. I would not presume to suggest any of my reactions might be used as a valid model for yours—though I’m sure they can.”

Bron’s frown dropped to the micro-mountains, the miniscule trees, the shore where tiny waves lapped the bright, barbaric sands. After seconds, he said: “She gave me one of the most marvelous experiences of my life. At first I only thought she’d lead me to it. Then suddenly I found out she’d conceived, created, produced, and directed ... She took my hand, you see. She took my hand and led me—”

Lawrence sighed. “And when you put your arm around my feeble, palsied shoulders—”

Bron looked up again, still frowning. “If we all had died this evening, Lawrence, I wouldn’t have died the same person as I was if I’d died this morning.”

“Which is what your initial comments about the whole thing seemed to suggest—before you began to intimate how cold, inhuman, heartless, and untrustworthy this sweet creature obviously was. I was only trying to remind you.” Lawrence sighed again. “And I suppose I did, at least that night, love you in spite—”

Bron’s frown became a scowl. “Hey, come on—”

Lawrence’s wrinkled face (below the horseshoe of white furze surrounding the freckled pate) grew mockingly wry. “Wouldn’t you know. Here I am, in another passionately platonic affair with an essential louse.”

Seeing her, Bron said: “Lawrence, look, I do think of you as my friend. Really. But ...” Lawrence’s face came back, wryness still there. “But look, I’m not seventeen. I’m thirty-seven. I told you before, I did my experimenting when I was a kid—a good deal of it, too. And I’m content to stick by the results.” The experiments’ results, confirming him one with eighty percent of the population, according to those “quaint” statistics, was that he could function well enough with either sex; but only by brute, intellectualized fantasy could he make sex with men part of his actual life. The last brutal in-tellectualizing he’d done of any sort was his attendance at the Temple of the Poor Children of the Avestal Light and Changing Secret Name; brutality was just not what he was into. “I like you. I want to stay your friend. But, Lawrence, I’m not a kid and I’ve been here before.”