“Okay.” Bron nodded, smiled, and felt put upon.

Alfred had emigrated from some minor moon (Uranus’s—but then, which of Uranus’s weren’t minor; not one of the five was over 900 k’s in diameter) as a fourteen-year-old orphan; and didn’t like to talk about his past, either. (Even this much information had come to Bron via Lawrence.) Bron figured that emigrating at fourteen took about ten year’s more guts than emigrating at twenty-four, even if it was within the Satellite Federation. Hell, three years ago the situation had been so tense only Ganymede and Triton were accepting emigrants from Earth and Mars both. Triton only took them from Mars. “Alfred, has it ever occurred to you that you might be gay?” He asked because he felt he had to say something. “I mean, emotionally.” (Alfred, having gotten his favor, would sit silent the next hour if given his head.) Also, bits of the Spike’s conversation kept returning to him. “What I’d do if I had problems like that is check out a refixation clinic. Get your thing switched over to men and see if it all falls into place.”

“No,” Alfred said, shaking his head. “No____” But both the no’s and the headshake were despair rather than negation. “No ... I mean, I did that, once, you know? I mean that’s what my social worker said, too. They fixed it up for me. At a clinic in the u-1. For six months I tried it.”

“And?”

“It was awful. I mean I was horny for men all right. But as far as how it went when I got ’em in the sack, I mean it was just the same thing—up, down, in, out, and, ‘What, you’re finished already?’—only with complications—I mean, if they go in and you finish up in three seconds, then it hurts, you know? So you gotta ask them to take it out, and they still wanna go, and nobody likes that!”

“Mmmmm,” Bron said, because he couldn’t think of anything else.

“Finally, I just went back to the clinic and said, hey, please, would you put it back together the way it was before? Let me at least like what I like liking—you know?—whether I mess up or not. I mean—” Alfred sat back—“they’re supposed to be very common prob—

lems. It’s not like they were rare or anything.” Alfred frowned. “I mean it’s not like I’m the only person who ever had problems like that—you’d think they could do something for a guy.” He sat back a bit more. “Did you ever have problems like that?”

“Well ...” Bron considered. Two of his first three (major) sexual experiences (all within the month before his fourteenth birthday) might, with definition stretched, have been said to have involved premature orgasm, i.e., the orgasms had surprised him. But not since. What problems he now had (if they were problems) veered in the other direction: and even those merely tended to herald a recurrent (and blessedly mild) prostate infection that had popped up every year or so since he was thirty. “If you’re making it every other night,” Bron offered, “you can’t expect it to go perfect every time.” During his first professional years, when, at two, three, and often four a day, he had actually balled (the first time he’d calculated it, the number had taken him aback, too) eight hundred or more women, he’d been attacked by the ‘limps’ somewhat under a dozen times; since then, the frequency had gone substantially down. The only way he could conceive of Alfred’s problems was to assume that it was tantamount to being, basically, asexual. He was sure Alfred enjoyed roaming in the many meeting places with their loud music, their low lights, enjoyed being eyed by women, being engaged in conversation by them (or perhaps Alfred did the engaging. Bron knew he tended to project his most common experiences—rather than his preferences—on everybody), even enjoyed bringing them back to his eccentric address (“An all male co-op ... ? And you mean it isn’t gay?”). Perhaps Alfred even enjoyed ordering out-of-stock ointments at tiny shops. Sex, however (Bron was convinced), Alfred could not possibly enjoy. “Give it some time,” Bron said. “And, well ... I mean, when I was your age ...” But Alfred was seventeen. And Bron was a politic enough thirty-seven to know no seventeen-year-old (especially a seventeen-year-old who had elected to live so completely away from his peers as Alfred) wanted to be reminded of it.

So, politicly, he let it hang. “You know, last night, after the shield went off and you had your nosebleed, I almost knocked on your door to say hello, but I figured you—”

“I wish you had,” Alfred said. “Oh, man, I wish you had! I was all alone, no girl with me, no nothing—and suddenly I thought I was gonna die and my ears nearly popped and my nose started bleeding and I could hear things falling over in the other rooms—they cut the damn gravity!” Alfred took a breath. “They got me back together, you know—that big nigger who’s always tellin’ everybody what to do and why? But I couldn’t go to sleep for the rest of the night. I wish somebody had come in to see me. I really do.” Alfred’s green eyes came back to Bron’s. “You gonna pick up that ointment for me, huh?” They held all the old suspicion, the old mistrust. “Okay ... Good.” Then Alfred stood, turned (where the black suspenders crossed between his pimply shoulder blades, there was a red plastic Q. Bron thought: Q?) and walked away.

Understanding? Only slightly guilty, Bron asked himself: Where is it? And got no answer. I call it friendship, but it’s simpler than that. He uses me and I let him. Lord knows I’d prefer to spend any hour in either Lawrence’s or the big nigger’s company. Still ... is it just a bond between two, hung-up heterosexual males? He’s hung up in performance (and the hang-ups he has with it honestly make less sense to me than the propensities of a Lawrence, a Miriamne!)—And what am / hung up in ... ?

At any rate, Bron wished either Sam or Lawrence would come down into the commons room, with or without vlet.

For work next morning he wore clothes.

Lots of them.

All black.

He finished going through the Day Star-minus folder, closed it, put it back in the bottom drawer, and decided it would just have to wait for another week before he could bother writing up a coherency validation.

He was looking over a diptych of multiple-state evaluation programs which, for the life of him, he could not figure out in which of three directions the modular context was supposed to function, when Miriamne rapped on the jamb of the open door. “May I talk to you a minute?”

Bron sat back, pulled his cloak around him. “Certainly.”

She stopped, just inside the doorway, looking uncomfortable, looked at the bulletin board, looked at the desk corner. “Audri told me you’d asked for me to be transferred to another department.”

With a black-gloved forefinger, Bron pushed the mask higher on his nose; it had slipped a bit, which was fine for reading but not for talking t» i people standing up when you were sitting down. As he put his gloved palms on the gray graphpapen shingling his desk, it slipped again; which meant he would have to conduct this interview—he felt the clutch of embarrassment high in his chest (or low in his throat) and swallowed at it—with her head cut off by his eye-hole’s upper edge, muzzily, at the nose. “That’s right. After a little thought, I just decided it was silly, with your training—cybralogs, or whatever—to waste your time and ... well, my time too.”

“Mmmm,” she said. “And there I thought I was catching on pretty fast for someone who didn’t know her way around at all.”

“Oh,” he said, “really, that isn’t the point—”

“I’m afraid what the point is, is that I’m out of a job.”

“Mmmm?” he asked, not sure what she meant. “Well, you mustn’t worry. They’ll find you a place eventually—it may take another day or two. But chances are it’ll be closer to your field.”