“That’s right,” she mused. “Marriage is legal on Mars too. For some reason, we only think of that in terms of Earth out here.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Though if what you said about relationships not being your forte is true, the other thing you said still makes sense, even if it is a cliche. Well, what does any type of life really fit you for today? I’m damned if I know what life in the theater has done for—” The door flew in, crashing against the wall. Bron jerked up on his elbow to see two bare feet, with frayed cuffs fallen away from red-haired calves, waving in the air. The acrobat (Windy?) walked in on his hands. In the hall, somebody was playing the guitar.

Bron was about to say something about knocking first when a little girl (perhaps six? perhaps seven?) on very thick-soled shoes and draped in a trailing, tattered veil of sequins, ran into the room, leapt on the bed (her knee bruised his thigh), weeping, and flung herself into the Spike’s arms; the Spike shrieked, “Oh, my goodness ... !” and, to Bron’s astonishment (he was sitting on the bed’s edge now, both feet on the warm plastifoam floor), began to weep, herself, and cuddle the grubby-fingered creature.

“Hey, I was just wondering if you—” That was the hirsute, half-blind woman with the mastectomy, leaning in the door. Astonishment bloomed over her scarred face. “Oh, I’m sorry!” As she pulled back, two more women—one carrying a ladder, the other a tool case—pushed in.

“Look,” the one with the case said, clanking it on the floor and pushing the catch up with one, very pointy-toed boot, “we’ve got to get this done now. Really. I’m sorry.” The cover clacked open.

“Hey, what—” Bron said (he was standing, now, near the wall) to the knobby ankle waving near his shoulder—“I mean is this just one of your damn micro-theater pieces? Because if it is ...”

“Man,” the head said (which was down at about his knee, a waterfall of red hair all around it sweeping the floor, between splayed, hammy hands), “don’t ever live in an all woman co-op unless they’re all straight, or they’re all gay, every last one. It just isn’t worth it, you know what I mean?” The hair shook aside enough to see an ear. “I mean, really!” The hands shifted. The feet swung.

The little girl, sitting on top of the ladder now, sniffled.

The last two women who had come in were making marks across the wall with black crayons.

The Spike, on the edge of the bed, was pulling up her baggy red trousers, standing and turning (on her back, fastened with the same brass clips, was a red Z, as mysterious as the R in front) and pulling her black suspenders up over her shoulder. She turned back and, knuckling her tear-wet eyes, came over to Bron. “I’m sorry about this, really, I am ... But I just tend to anthropomorphize everything!”

One of the women swung a small sledge against the wall. Cracks zagged out from the blow. The little girl on top of the ladder burst out weeping afresh.

So did the Spike: “... Oh, go on\ Please, go on. Really!” She gestured behind her with one hand. Tears ran, in three lines, down one cheek, in one down the other. Suddenly she hit at Windy’s foot. “Oh, stop sulking and stand up!”

The acrobat’s feet swayed wildly, kicked violently, regained balance. From knee level came a torrent of exotic and specialized profanity that brought back to Bron, with incredible clarity, the face of one particular earthie he had worked with in the Goebels: If Windy had not spent time on Earth as an extra-legal, male prostitute, he’d certainly spent a lot of time with men who had!

But the Spike had seized Bron’s arm and was pushing him toward the door, in which the guitarist (Charo?) stood, her instrument high under her breasts, her head bent pensively, her left hand, far up the neck, clutching chord after chord; the outsized muscle between thumb and forefinger on her right hand pulsed as her nails rattled notes into the corridor.

“By eight o’clock—!” The Spike turned back to the room and called, tearily, with a sweep of one arm that sent her staggering against him, “I promise! Really! By eight o’clock, I will know what I’m doing!”

The hammer smashed against the wall.

The Spike pushed past the guitarist—“No, not that way—” which, Bron realized, was to him, not her. She made a great, head-clearing snuffle—“This way!”—grabbed Bron’s arm again, and tugged him into the hall.

In rakish imitation of Sam (which he indulged about once a month) Bron had gone to work that day wearing nothing. Still, he would have liked a chance to wash, or, failing that, at least to sleep for twenty minutes more, cuddled against her rather bony back. But he followed her around a corner, where the hallway went completely dark—and collided with her; she had turned to face him. Her arms closed around him. Her cheek, still wet, brushed his. “This isn’t very hospitable, I know. Shall we just stand here and hold one another a few moments? Really, it’s just that our company is the co-op’s guests—noncredit guests, too; one has to put up.”

He grunted something between annoyance and assent; and held her and was held by her; and, except for the plastic letter against his chest, felt more and more comfortable.

People, from time to time, passed.

After the fifth, she disengaged. “Let’s go outside and take a walk. I feel I’ve been just dreadful.”

He grunted again, took her hand; she squeezed, and (to the sound of her brushing pantaloons) they walked along the corridor. “I was going to ask you,” he said, getting the idea the first time that moment, “if you took all your ‘audiences’ to bed with you—as a sort of encore?”

“I don’t even take most of them to bed. Why?”

“Well, I ... it’s just that I have difficulty, with you, sometimes, deciding what’s real and what’s theater.”

“Do you?” she asked; she sounded surprised; and intrigued. Then she laughed. “But all theater is reality. And all reality is ... theater!”

Bron grunted again, annoyed at something other than the ironic triteness. After a silent minute’s walking, he asked: “When do we get outside?”

“We are outside.”

“Huh?” He looked at the walls (a dull, doorless brown), at the ceiling; there was no ceiling. The walls went up and up and disappeared in unlicensed blackness. He brought his eyes down; ahead, red, luminous letters of the street coordinates glowed. “Oh.”

“I liked you,” she said at last, in answer to the question he’d asked over a minute ago; “What you looked like, first. Then, the way you ... well, responded to our work. I mean, we know it’s good. We’ve done that one for perhaps a dozen people so far, and all of them have liked it. But your response was so open and ... well, ‘rich’ is the way Dian—that’s our set designer—put it when we talked about it later.”

“I got talked about later?”

“Oh, we always discuss each performance afterward. That’s just part of the backstage (as it were) work the audience never sees. Presumably, however, the next audience gets the benefit. I mean, basically we’re concerned with leading people gently into a single moment of verbal and spatial disorientation—I say disorientation: what I mean, of course, is a freeing, to experience a greater order than the quotidian can provide. A moment of verbal, spatial, and spiritual energy in resolution. That’s so necessary in a world that’s as closed in as life in any satellite city must, of necessity, be. Especially—” She looked up the high, blank walls—“in someplace as claustric as the u-1 sector. Maybe wanting to be able to break out, even through art, is my ice-farm heritage working again. Yes, I spent my childhood scooting up and down plastic corridors from bubble-hut to bubble-hut, or in ice-treaders that were a lot more cramped than this. Still, the point is, those corridors and huts were transparent. And beyond them—” She took a breath—“was the sky!”