“Worlds must be very peculiar places.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t really the only reason we’re at war with them.”

“Or about to be at war with them. Triton, anyway.”

The Spike’s head came up. Her hair feathered the edge of his hand. “Small dark women with big hips and withered arms—” She glanced at him. “Someday you must tell me what you see in a big-boned, scrawny blonde like me.”

“They’re mutually inclusive areas, not mutually exclusive. And they include quite a bit more ...” He nuzzled her shoulder and wondered much the same thing she’d just asked; his mind, used to such meander-ings, had only been able to come up with a sort of generalized incest, or even narcissism, the denial of which was the reason for those other tastes, now (interestingly), broken through.

“Of course,” the Spike said, “the whole thing sounds terribly bizarre, being a prostitute and all.” She looked at him again. “What did your parents think?”

He shrugged; she had broached an uncomfortable area; but he’d always thought honesty a good thing in matters of sex: “I never talked about it with them, really. They were both civic constructionist computer operators—light laborers to you folks out here. They were pretty glum about everything, and I guess that would have only been something else for them to be glum about.”

“My parents—” she said, yawning, “all nine of them—are Ganymede ice-farmers. No cities for them. They’re good people, you know? But they can’t see further than the next methane thaw. Now they’d be quite happy if I’d gone into commiters, like you—or Miriamne. But the theater, I’m afraid, is a little beyond them. It’s not they disapprove, you know ... it’s just ...” She shook her head.

“My parents—and they were only the two—didn’t disapprove. We just didn’t discuss it. That’s all. But then, we didn’t discuss much of anything.”

She was still shaking her head. “Ice-sleds, checking vacuum seals on this piece of equipment, that piece, always looking at the world through polarized blinkers—good solid people. But ... I don’t know: limited.”

Bron nodded, to end, rather than continue. These u-1 folk would talk about their pasts, and, more unsettling, nudge you to talk. (The archetypal scene: The ice-farm Matriarch saying to the young Earth man with the dubious past [or Patriarch saying to the equally dubious young Mars woman]: “We don’t care about what you done, just what you do—and even that, once you done it, we forget it.”) In the licensed area of the city, this philosophy seemed—within reason—to hold. But then, what was the u-1 for, if not to do things differently in? “Now you see,” Bron said, “that seems romantic to me, growing up in the untamed, crystalline wilderness. I used to go to every ice-opera they’d run at the New Omoinoia; and when they’d rerun them on the public channels, a year or so later, I kept an awful lot of clients waiting downstairs while I found out how Bo Ninepins was going to get the settlers out from under another methane slide.”

“Ha!” She flung herself on the bed. “You did? So did my folks. They loved them! You’ve probably seen part of our farm—the ice-opera companies were always using our south acres to do location shooting. It was the only farm within six hundred miles of G-city that had any place on it that looked like it could have been in an ice-opera! Maybe hanging around the shooting company was where I got my first prod toward the theater—who knows? Anyway, we must have burrowed down to the Diamond Palace once a month from the time I was twelve, the whole lot of us. Like going to a religious meeting, I swear. Then they’d stay up till one o’clock in the morning, drinking and complaining about the details that the picture people had gotten wrong this time. And be right there for the next one next month—now that’s what my folks think of as theater: noble old loner Lizzie Ninepins saving the settlers from the slide, or virile young Pick-Ax Pete with his five wives and four husbands carving a fortune out from a methane chasm ...” She laughed. “It was a beautiful landscape to grow up in—at least the south acres was—even if you never saw it without a faceplate between you and the vacuum. Now if I ever directed an ice-opera, my folks would think I’d arrived! Government subsidized micro-theater, indeed! I suppose I’ve had a secret urge to, ever since my name day ... I chose the name of a mother of mine I’d never known, who’d got killed in an ice-slide before I was born.” The Spike laughed. “Now I bet you’ve seen that one in a dozen ice-operas! / certainly had.” (Bron smiled. In the Satellites, children were given only a first name at birth—about half the time the last name of one of their genetic parents, government serial numbers doing for all official identification. Then, at some coming-of-age day, they took a last name for themselves, from the first name of someone famous, or in honor of some adult friend, workmate, or teacher. Naming age was twelve on the moons of Saturn, fourteen on the moons of Jupiter; he wasn’t sure what it was here on Triton, but he suspected it was younger than either. On Earth last names still, by and large, passed down paternally. On Mars, they could pass either paternally or maternally. His father’s last name was Helstrom; if, as by now he was sure was pretty unlikely, he ever joined a family out here, Helstrom would be the [first] name of his first son.) The Spike laughed again, this time muffling the sound in his armpit. Then her head came up. “Do you know what Miriamne really said about you?”

Bron rolled to his side. “She didn’t say I was trying hard?”

“She said that you were a first-class louse but that you were trying hard. She told me this terrible story about how you—” She stopped. Her eyes widened. “Oh dear! I forgot ... you’re her boss—she’s not yours. The last job she had, she was a production fore—

man for a cybralog manufacturing compound ... Well, now I’ve done it!” She shook her head. “I’ve never worked in an office, and I ... forgot.”

Bron smiled. “What was the horrible story she told?”

“As she was running out of here, she blurted out something about you making some personnel receptionist’s life miserable on the phone just to impress her as a first step to getting in her pants.”

Bron laughed. “I guess she had my number!”

“If that’s what you were doing, you mustn’t hold it against her.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t.” He nuzzled again, closing his arms around her. “You know about the prostitute’s heart of gold, lying around underneath it all?”

“Ah, but gold can be a very cold, heavy metal.” Her head turned on his shoulder. “Do you think being a prostitute was helpful?”

He shrugged, cradling her. “I think it makes you surer of yourself when you’re actually in bed—not necessarily a better lover—but a more relaxed one.”

“You have,” she said toward the ceiling, “a certain pyrotechnical flair that, I admit, I admire the hell out of.”

“On the other hand, I don’t know if it does anything for the relationship part of a sexualizationship. Maybe it’s having so much sex right there, and not having to walk further than downstairs to the client lounge to get it, and it’s paying the bills to boot—I guess when you finally gQt out into the real world and find that people are as interested in you as they are in your technique—and expect you to be interested in them too—it takes some adjusting to. Maybe I never have. Lasting sexualizationships just aren’t my strong point ... no!” He looked down at the top of her head. “That isn’t the way I feel at all! Isn’t it funny how we always say the cliche thing, even if we don’t believe it! No. I don’t think it hurt me in any way, at all. Some of it was pleasant. Some of it was unpleasant. And it was all a long time ago. But I learned a hell of a lot, about myself, about people. Perhaps I never had much of a bent for relationships, even as a kid; which is why I went into prostitution in the first place. But it’s certainly made me a lot more tolerant of a lot more different types of people than most ordinary Martians—say most of my clients. What I learned there is probably the only thing that made it possible for me to adjust—however badly I’ve done it—to emigrating out here to the Satellites ... where you—how do they put it?—can’t make a redressable contract across either a sexual or a sectarian subject.”