She shrugged Windy away (Bron unclenched his teeth) with: “I remember too many nights with you already. Cut it out, huh?”

The head nuzzling in her neck came up, shook back the red hair (it was the first time he had seen it right side up for more than a second at a time: good-natured, pockmarked, scraggy-bearded) and grinned at Bron: “I’m trying to make you jealous.”

You’re succeeding, Bron didn’t say: “Look, that’s all right. I mean, your friends are probably having some sort of cast party to celebrate—” Somehow one handful of multihued nails were now hooked over Bron’s shoulder, the other still on the Spike’s:

Windy stood between them: “Look, I’ll leave you guys alone. Back at the co-op, they’ve said we can party in the commons room as late as we like.” He shook his red head. “Those women want us out of there in the worst way!”

Both hands rose and fell at once. Bron thought: That’s politic.

“See you back at the place—”

“We won’t be using the room for the whole—”

“Sweetheart,” Windy said, “even if you were, I got invites to several others.” And Windy turned and bounded off to help someone carry away what the exercise wheel had collapsed into.

The Spike’s other hand came up to take Bron’s; his eyes came back to see them, one bare with colored nails, three gloved (two in white, one in black). “Come,” she said, softly. “Let me take you ...”

Later, whenever he reviewed those first three encounters, this was the one he remembered most clearly; and was the one that, in memory, most disappointed. Exactly why he was disappointed, however, he could never say.

They did return to the co-op; she had put her arm around his shoulder, their capes had rustled together; bending toward him, as they walked through the streets, she had said: “You know I’ve been thinking about those things you were saying to me, about your boss. And everything—” (He’d wondered when she’d had time to think:) “All through the performance, actually. I just couldn’t get it out of my head. The things you seem to have confused to me seem so clear. The arrows you seem to be assuming run from B to A to me so obviously run from A to B that I tend to distrust my own perception—not of the Universe, but of what in the Universe you’re actually referring to. You seem to have confused power with protection: If you want to create a group of people, join a commune. If you want to be protected by one, go to a co-op. If you want both, nothing stops you from dividing your time between the two. You seem to have making a family down as an economic right denied you which you envy, rather than an admirable but difficult economic undertaking. Just like Mars, we have antibody birth control for both women and men that makes procreation a normal-off system. You have free access to birth pills at a hundred clinics—”

“Yes,” he said, to be shocking: “I’ve taken them once—for a fee.”

And in typical satellite fashion she did not seem to register any shock at all. Well, they were in the u-1, where the shocking was commonplace, weren’t they.

“You only have two decisions to make about a family,” she was going on. “Somewhere around name-day, you decide if you want to have children by accident or by design; if by design—which well over ninety-nine percent do—you get your injection. Then, later, you have to decide that you do want them: and two of you go off and get the pill.”

“I know all that—” he said; and she squeezed his shoulder—to halt him speaking, he realized. “That,” he finished, “at least, is the same as in Bellona.”

“Yes, yes. But I’m just trying to spell the whole thing out to see if I can figure out where you got off the track. With it set up this way, less than twenty percent of the population chooses to reproduce.” (That was not the same as Bellona; but then, Mars was a world, not a moon.) “In a closed-atmosphere city, that’s just under what we can tolerate. In the satellites we try to dissolve that hierarchical bond between children and economic status Earth is so famous for—education, upkeep, and social subsidy—so that you don’t have the horrible situation where if you have no other status, there’s always children. And no matter how well you perform, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’ve got sex confused with. On the one hand, you tell your story in a perfectly coherent way—only I’ve been to parties at family communes in, if not on, the Ring. I’ve been to parties at nonfamily co-ops, where, among forty or fifty adults there were always two or three one-parent families. I’ve been to parties given by adolescent family communes who, for religious reasons, lived in the streets. They’ve all got the same basic education available; and basic food and shelter you can’t be denied credit for at any co-op ,..” She had gone on like this, pulling him closer every time he began to wonder what she was trying to say, till he stopped listening—just tried to feel, instead. They were already at the party by now. One of the first things he did feel was the faint hostility (Windy, who was really a pretty nice guy he decided, and Dian, who by the end of the evening was the nicest person, as far as he was concerned, in the company—with none of the Spike’s brittleness and a gentler way with her equally astute insights—pointed a few subtle examples of it out) between the women who lived at the co-op and the commune who were leaving the next morning. “Though I suppose,” Dian said, leaning arms as hairy as Philip’s on equally hairy knees, “it would try anybody’s patience to have a bunch of strolling players parked in your cellar, carrying on till all hours, while rumors of plague are flying ...” and she nodded toward a modest Triton with the Alliance Now poster on the wall.

He talked to some of the other “audience” who’d been frozen into the last production—various people whom the troupe had performed for, and with whom various members had made friends. Yes, they’d been as surprised by it as Bron had been. From this discussion he looked up to see Miriamne in the room. For ten minutes he desperately wanted to leave, but could think of no way to effect it smoothly. Then, to his em—

barrassment and astonishment, he was asking her, across a conversation group that somehow they’d both become part of, how her job situation was going. She explained, in a friendly enough way, that she was going to work as a transport mechanic at an ice-farm not too far from Tethys. It wasn’t cybralogs, but at least it was working with her hands. He expressed his relief and felt something sink still further inside, something invalidated, something denied.

He turned away to listen to an intense, polysyllabic discussion of the vast difficulty of performing pre-twen-tieth-century theatrical works for a twenty-second-century audience:

“You mean because of the length?”

“There’s that. Primarily, though, it results from the peripitea’s invariably pivoting on sexual jealousy; that’s just so hard for a contemporary audience to relate to.”

“That’s silly,” Bron said. “I get jealous—oh, maybe not specifically sexually. I know you—” to the Spike, who was leaning, affectionately, against him, “and Windy, and that woman who plays the guitar, must have something going. I mean, I’ve seen the bed—”

“He’s even slept in it,” the Spike said, still leaning.

“It would be silly to be jealous of that; but as far as attention goes, I’m as possessive of that in people I’m having a thing with as it’s possible to be ... I guess.”

“So we’ve noticed,” said that woman who played the guitar, with a slightly mocking smile (reminiscent of the Spike’s) that bothered him slightly because, till then, he hadn’t noticed Charo was holding the Spike’s other hand. And somewhere else in the room Windy was laughing.

The Spike had been paying amazing amounts of attention to him, of the silent and unveering sort (Had she been once out of physical contact with him since they’d entered the room ... ?) that made him feel relaxed, secure and, also, practically oblivious to her presence. (The three of them had probably discussed it the previous night and decided he was “that type”—which, though it did not break the relaxed security’s surface, drove the unsettling wedge beneath it deeper.) He wished there was overt reason to dislike the gather—