“On.”

“Super-elegant!”

“And he’s the type who wouldn’t give a presover-eignty franq for all your slogan-writing, pamphleteering malcontents. There’s a guy in my co-op who’s actually in the government, and on what I’m sure you would consider the wrong side, too: he probably thinks more of the malcontents than Philip does.” Over the railing, to their right, far away in darkness, a transport trundled. “Last Sovereignty Day, Philip had a big party out at his place—”

“That was patriotic!”

“—with all his colleagues, and all the colleagues of all the others in his commune. You should have seen it—”

“A couple of times I’ve been blessed with friends in the Ring—which is only a street or so away and that was pretty stunning.”

“There’s thirteen in his commune—”

“A regular coven!”

“—not counting children. Three of the women and two of the men—one, a really obnoxious faggot named Danny—are in the absolutely highest credit slot.”

“I’m surprised all thirteen of them aren’t.”

“Philip is three slots higher than I am and is always talking about what a bum the rest of the family thinks he is. They’ve got at least two dozen rooms, half of them great circular things, with sweeping stairways and transparent west walls looking in among the city’s towers with the shield ablaze overhead, and transparent east walls looking out over the ice-crags, with real stars in the real sky—”

“Shades of the place I called home—”

“Duplex recreation rooms; garden rooms; swimming pools—”

“You did say pools, with an V ... ?”

“Three that I remember. One with its own waterfall, splattering and splashing down from the pool upstairs. Their kids are so damned well-behaved and precocious—and a third of them so obviously Philip’s you wonder if they have him around for anything else. And people drinking and swimming and eating all over the place and asking, ‘Did you hire any cooking craftsmen to help you with all this?’ and some very sleek lady of the commune in lots of pearls and very little else saying, ‘Oh, no, that’s not the way we do things on the Ring,’ and, with this amazing smile; ‘That’s how they’d do it over there ...’ nodding in the Ring’s direction. And a gaggle of seven—and eight-year-olds being herded around by a little buck-naked oriental and someone says, ‘Oh, are you their nurse?’ and, with this big, oriental smile: ‘No, I’m one of the fathers,’ which, I suppose, if you’d looked twice would have been as obvious as Philip, and this one’s into interstellar graviat-rics—”

“The other top-slotter?”

“You guessed it. And just to try being rude, you ask another lady of the commune, who’s been introduced to you as an Enforcement Commissioner in the Executive Department, if she’s in the top slot too—”

“Two down from the top, I’d guess—”

“And she says, ‘No, I’m two down from the top. What slot are you in—’”

“What slot are you in?”

“I’ve never been any higher than fifteenth from the top, and I don’t see any reason to be higher. Only she’s already asking me if I wouldn’t like to go for a swim with her? The heated pool’s wpstairs; and if we want a chilly plunge we can just fall in right here. And is the music hired? No, it’s by their two oldest daughters, who’re just terribly creative when it comes to things like music and cooking and automotive physics. Then you meet another beautiful woman with two children—one of them obviously Philip’s—calling her ‘Ma’ and playing together in the sand so you ask, ‘Are you part of the commune too?’ and she laughs and says, ‘Oh, no. I used to be, a few years ago, but I’ve separated. I’m out now, on Neriad. But we just came in for the party. I wouldn’t have missed it! The kids were always so happy here!’ It was all so healthy and accepting and wholesome and elegant you wanted to vomit—I did, actually, on about my tenth glass of something awfully strong; and all over some weird-looking art object I figured would be difficult to replace and the worse for it. And sure enough, there’s Philip, a kid on his shoulders, with his saggy left tit and one of his women, Alice, with a kid on hers—she’s the nigger with the tattoos—smiling and holding my head and saying, ‘Here, take this pill. You’ll feel better in a minute. Really. Oh, don’t worry about that! You’re not the only one.’ I mean, after a while, you want to be the only one—some way, some form, some how ... Tattoos? / had tattoos when I was a kid. And I had ’em removed, too.

The hard way. Toward the end I guess I fell into the pool and about five people pulled me out and I suppose I was just angry—not to mention drunk again-Just do something really outrageous—there was one woman there named Marny who was really nice—I started talking about how Fd fuck anybody there for five franqs; just five franqs, and I’ll show any one of you here heaven—”

“Mmmmm,” the Spike said.

“Only who should be there too but that Danny character; with a big grin, he says; ‘Hey, Vm into that, from time to time. Five franqs? I’ll take you up!’ I just looked at him, you know, and I said, ‘Not you, cock-sucker. What about one of your women?’ I mean I just wanted to break through, some how. You know what he say’s to me, with this very concerned look, like you’ve asked him to play one of his old thirty-three recordings, but he knows it’s got a scratch? ‘Well, I don’t really think any of our women are into that, right now—except possibly Joan. If you’ll just wait a moment, I’ll run and ask,’ and goes dashing up one of those incredible stairways with the incredible view of the ice outside. Of course Philip is already back by this time, and I’m trying to tell these women, I mean I am a good lay. A really good lay. Professional quality—I was a professional. You don’t even have any professionals out here! I mean, I could make it work for me. And Philip, who must be almost as drunk as I am, is saying, ‘Yeah, I was into hustling—Marny and I both were when we were kids and hitchhiking around. First time she was on the Earth and I was on Luna we did it for a few months. The illegal kind, I think. Only I can never remember on Earth which kinds are illegal. It’s great for the body. But it’s a little hard on the mind.’ He said it was like it was playing tennis all the time and never getting a chance to talk to anybody except over the net! I mean, can you imagine that? From Philip? If I hadn’t been so drunk, I probably would’ve been surprised. As it was, I guess I realized it was just one more annoyance I was going to have to live in the same world with, maybe chuckle at from time to time. No matter how much puking I did.” The walkway led them around a gentle curve. “After that, I had to leave. No logic or metalogic could have made me stay. It was all perfect, beautiful, without a crack or a seam. Any blow you struck was absorbed and became one with the structure. Walking back from the Ring—Philip had asked didn’t I want to wait for Joan and, when I said no, he made me take another pill; they work—I kept on wanting to cry.”

“Why?”

“It was beautiful, whole, harmonious, radiant—it was a family I’d have given my left testicle—hell, both of them—to be a daughter or a son to. What a place to have grown up in, secure that you are loved whatever you do, whatever you are, and with all the knowledge and self-assurance it would give you while you decided what that was. But the great lie those people hold out, whether they’re in a commune or a co-op—and this, I suppose, when all is said and done, is why I hate them—even the ones I like, like Audri (who’s my other boss), is: Anyone can have it, be a part of it, bask in its radiance, and be one with the radiating element itself—oh, perhaps not everyone can have it at an address within shoulder-rubbing distance of London Point, but somewhere, someplace, it’s waiting for you ... if not in a family commune, then in a work commune like your theater company, if not in a commune, then at a ... well, a heterophilic co-op; if not at a heterophilic co-op, then at a homophilic one. Somewhere, in your sector or in mine, in this unit or in that one, there it is: pleasure, community, respect—all you have to do is know the kind, and how much of it, and to what extent you want it. That’s all.” He had almost cried coming back to his licensed sector co-op that morning. He almost cried now. “But what happens to those of us who don’t know? What happens to those of us who have problems and don’t know why we have the problems we do? What happens to the ones of us in whom even the part that wants has lost, through atrophy, all connection with articulate reason. Decide what you like and go get it? Well, what about the ones of us who only know what we don’t like? I know I didn’t like your Miriamne friend! I know I didn’t want to work with her. I got her kicked out of her job this morning. I don’t know how any of those things came about. And I don’t want to know. But I don’t regret it, one bit! I maybe have—for a minute—but I don’t now. And I don’t want to.”