“Not only are you a louse. You are a presumptuous louse. I am not thirty-seven. I am over seventy-three. I too have been here before. Probably more times than you have.” Lawrence bent over and contemplated the board again, while Bron contemplated (again) the phenomenon by which, between some time he thought of as then (which contained his experiments with both sex and religion) and the time he thought of as now (which contained ... well, all this), old people had metamorphosed from creatures three or four times his age to creatures who were only two up or less. Lawrence said: “I do believe it’s your move. And don’t worry, I intend to stay your friend.”

“What do you think I should do, Lawrence?”

“Whatever you think you should do. You might try playing the game—hello, Sam!” who had come up to the table. “Say, why don’t you two play together against me. Bron’s gone quite mushy over some theatrical woman in the u-1 and can’t get up nerve to go back and find her, which is fine by me. But it’s shot his concentration all to hell, which isn’t. Come on, Sam. Sit down and give him a hand.”

On the point of spluttering protest, Bron made room on the couch for the jovial, brilliant, powerful—should he just get up and leave? But Sam asked something about his meld strategy and, when Bron explained, gave a complimentary whistle. At least Bron thought it was complimentary.

They played. Tides turned. So did the score. By the time they adjourned for the evening (elementary players, Lawrence had explained, shouldn’t even hope to play a game to completion for the first six months), Bron and Sam were pounding each other’s shoulders and laughing and congratulating themselves and turning to congratulate Lawrence and, of course, they would all get together tomorrow evening and take up where they’d left off.

As Bron walked down the corridor toward his room, he decided warmly that the trouncing he had given the old pirate, even if it had taken Sam’s help to do it, had made the evening worth it.

At his door, he stopped, frowned toward the door opposite.

He hadn’t even asked Sam how Alfred was. Should he knock now and find out? A sudden memory of one of the few things like a personal conversation he’d ever had with Alfred returned: once Alfred had actually taken Bron to a restaurant (recommended by Flossie, who had had it recommended to him by a friend of Freddie’s) which turned out to cater almost entirely to well-heeled (and rather somber) nine—to thirteen-year-olds. (The younger ones were simply swathed in fur!) Only a handful of adolescents even near Alfred’s age were present, and they all seemed to be overlooking the place with patent good will and palpable nostalgia. Bron was the single adult there. During dinner Bron had been rambling on about something or other when Alfred leaned across the table and hissed, “But I don’t want relationships! I don’t want friendships! I want sex—sometimes. That’s what I’m doing at Serpent’s House. Now get off my back!” Two sexually unidentifiable children, hands locked protectively around their after-dinner coffee bulbs, turned away small, bald, brown faces to muffle smiles in their luxuriant collars. Yet he still considered Alfred his friend, because Alfred, like all his others, had come to him, still came to him, asking that he do this, or could he lend him that, or would he mail this coupon to that advertiser, or this letter of protest about what some other had sent him, pick up this or that on the way home, or where should he throw that out and, yeah, sure you can have it if you want it. With varying amounts of belligerence, Bron complied to these requests (to keep peace, he told himself at first), only to discover that, in his compliance, he valued the relationship—friendship, he corrected himself (because he was thirty-seven, not seventeen). I suppose, Bron thought, standing in the hall, I understand him, which has something to do with it. I certainly understand him better than I understand Lawrence. Or Sam. (Or that woman ... ? Again her face returned to him, turning in delightful laughter.) He turned to his door.

As far as knocking on Alfred’s? If Alfred wasn’t all right, Bron understood him enough to know that he wouldn’t want to be caught at it. And if he was, he wouldn’t want to be disturbed in it. (If he’s all right, Bron thought, he’s probably sleeping. That’s what I’d do with my all-right time if I had as little of it as that poor kid.) Bron pushed open his own door and stepped into a dimly lighted room, with an oval bed (that could expand to hold three: despite Alfred’s secretiveness, there was nothing in the co-op house rules that said you couldn’t ball as many people as you liked as long as you did it in your own room), a reader, a microfiche file drawer, a television screen and two dials below it for the seventy-six public channels and his three private ones, two windows (one real, which looked out on the alley behind the building, the other a changeable, holographic diarama: blue curtains were drawn across both), clothes drawers, sink drawers, and toilet drawers in the wall, plastic collars here and there on the blue rug from which, at the push of a switch in the control drawer, inflatable chairs would balloon.

It was a room like Alfred’s room, like Lawrence’s, like Sam’s, indeed like some dozen others he had lived in on one world and three moons; a comforting room; a room like ten thousand times ten thousand others.

At four twenty-seven in the morning, Bron woke suddenly, wondering why. After five minutes in the dark, an idea occurred—though he was not sure if it was the idea that had startled him from sleep. He got up, went out into the hall, and down to the console room.

Left over on the screen, from the last person to use it, were two lists. (Usually it was something from Freddie’s, or Flossie’s, home-study course.) Absently

Bron ran his eye down the one on the right: after half a dozen entries, he realized he was reading down names of former Presidents of Mars. His eye caught at Brian Sanders, the second of Mars’s two (out of twenty-four male) women presidents. It was under Brian Sanders, the old firebrand and roaring-girl, that, fifty years ago, male prostitution had been made legal in Bellona; also, ran the story, she had single-handedly driven the term “man-made” from most languages of Earth (where her speeches had of course been televised) and Mars, by insistantly referring to all objects of war, as well as most creations of Earth culture, as “boy-made.”

The list on the left (male and female names mixed equally and at random) was—it was obvious just from the groupings into seven—names of the various governing boards of the Outer Satellite Federation. Yes, the last group were the ones in power now, during the War Alliance: their names were all over the public channels. (Male and female names out here, of course, didn’t mean too much. Anyone might have just about any name—like Freddie and Flossie—especially among second, third, and fourth generation citizens.) Bron wondered what political bet or argument the information had been summoned up to resolve; and, without even sitting, cleared the current program. A medical program was still set underneath it—but it wasn’t Alfred’s.

Bron punched out General Information.

He was expecting ten minutes of cross-reference and general General Info run-around when he dialed “The Spike: actress (occupation)”—how would you file information on someone like that? The screen flickered for a second, then blinked out:

“The Spike—working name of Gene Trimbell, producer, director, playwright, actress, general manager of a shifting personnel theatrical commune, which see. Confirm? : : biographical : : critical : : descriptive : : public record⁹’

Bron frowned. He certainly wasn’t interested in her biography. He pressed Biography anyway.