“Yeah,” a pleasant-looking youngster standing next to her said, leaning his elbows on the bar. “There really are times when it’s just like that.” He cocked his head, smiled, nodded.

Bron said: “There are a hundred and fifty other people in here you could approach who would be more interested in it than I am, Now get lost. And if you don’t, I’ll kick you in the balls. And I mean it!”

The youngster frowned, then said: “Hey, sorry ... f” and turned away, while somebody else wedged into his place. And Bron thought, a little hysterically: I am in the position where I am here to be approached and cannot acknowledge an approach of any sort: otherwise, I will turn off the person I am here to be approached by. That’s ridiculous! she thought, shaking her head for the third time to the younger of the two women bartenders, who’d just asked her again what she wanted to drink. What in the world does that get you? In another time, on another world (or, indeed, in another bar, with the rules carefully spelled out in the monthly newsletter), raped. And that wasn’t the answer either, because once on Mars (it had been the night after his nineteenth birthday) he had been raped, by a gang of five women with hard, metallic eyelids as banal as the lyrics to all the thousand (orphan-) Annie-shows that had spawned them, hell raising through the dawn-dim alleys of the Goebels and enraged by the symbol above his right eye; and though, for a few months, he had actually fantasized sexually about the one of the five who hadn’t (actually) taken part and (for the first few minutes) tried to stop the others, he’d known even then that was just a strategy for salvaging something from a thoroughly unpleasant experience that had left him with a sprained thigh, a dislocated shoulder, and a punctured eardrum which (in another world, at another time) might have made him deaf in one ear for life. Remembering, she ran a foreknuckle along her gold brow—completely meaningless on a woman, of course; but out here no one would know. No one would care.

I simply shouldn’t be here, Bron thought. The fear that it was somehow the sex itself she was afraid of was what, she realized, had held her here this long. (And that, she suddenly realized, was pushing an hour!) But it was everything else that circled the sex, that kept it closed, locking it in, and—was this something to be thankful for?—somehow pure.

Bron took her hands from the counter, stepped back, turned—

He stood at the “active” side of the bar, among the men and women there, just turning from a conversation, his face settling, from its laughter, into the familiar dignity, the familiar strength. (Had she dreamed about it ... yes!) His eyes swept the room—passing hers, but her belly tightened when they did—to the even more boisterous “passive” bar.

Go, she thought. Go!

Really, it was time to leave! But he was there, like all she could ever remember imagining, as new as now and familiar as desire. She watched, numbing, knowing she had known him laughing among his hard-drinking friends, dark brows a-furrow in concentration over a problem whose solution might roll worlds from their orbits, carelessly asleep on a bed they had shared for the night, his eyes meeting hers in an expression that encompassed all the indifference of now but backed by the compassion of the unspeakably strong, the ineffably wise, and the knowledge of half a year’s companionship.

She pushed from the bar, started toward him, thinking: / mustn’t! I—and shouldered quickly between two people, her throat drying with the fear that, while she was turning to excuse herself here, beg a pardon there, he might leave. She couldn’t do this! This was all hopelessly and terribly wrong. But she was pushing between the last two, now, reaching to touch his naked shoulder.

He turned, frowned at her.

Bron whispered: “Hello, Sam ...” and then (by dint of what, she didn’t know) felt a smile quiver about her own mouth. “Need any new wives in your commune, Sam ... Or am I sallow enough ... ?”

For a moment Sam’s full mouth compressed into a great, black prune, the expression almost shock, or pain. Then his eyes left her face to drop down her body; and came slowly back, with a smile that was almost mocking. “Bron ... ?”

Let there be something beside derision in his smile, she whispered silently; her eyes closed lightly before it. “Sam, I ... I shouldn’t be here ... I mean on this side of the ... I mean ...” Bron blinked.

Sam’s hands came down on her shoulders, like black epaulets (in the half-light, Sam’s skin really was black, with a dim bronze highlight under his jaw, a dark amber one coiling his ear), and she had the wild vision she had somehow just risen in rank (thinking: And not a single soldier ...) and thinking at the same time: And it still isn’t sex! I know what sex is too well to fool myself into thinking that.

Sam was saying: “Hey, there!” And, “Well!” and then: “I admit, I’m ...” Then just nodded, with ap-proval(!) and with (still) the smile. “How’ve you been, huh? The Old Pirate mentioned you’d suddenly decided to cross the great divide. You keeping well?”

And because she suddenly felt her heart would crack the cage of her ribs, shatter her joints gone brittle at hip, knee, and elbow, she lay her head against his neck, held on to him. Had he been a column of black metal one degree below white-heat, he would not have been harder to grasp.

“Hey,” Sam said, softly. His hands slid across her back, held her.

“Sam ...” she said. “Take me out of here. Take me to another world ... anywhere ... I don’t care. I don’t even know if I can move on my own anymore ...”

One arm firmed across her back. One arm loosened. Sam said (and she heard his voice rumbling somewhere inside the great shape of him, as the smile retreated down inside): “Seems like I’m always taking you from some place or another ... Come on, we’ll have a stroll,” and tugged her shoulder, his arm still tight around her, bringing her with him through the crowd. She thought once to look around for Prynn. But they were already through a door, onto a dark ramp between high walls. “Just remember,” Sam went on, “the last world I took you to didn’t turn out such a hot idea, before you go asking me again. I mean, you never know where you’ll end up with old Sam—”

The ramp turned, and emptied them at the edge of a dim arena, with odd shapes set out here and there, and a glittering ceiling, here only seven or eight feet high, brushing the heads of some of the taller men and women strolling below the orange and blue light; at other places it rose up three or four stories: this was the bar’s “run,” where those who wanted to could move about, could wander over some sort of obstacle course in pursuit of their pleasure, could be pursued, or just walk.

“Sam, I’m sorry ... I didn’t mean to ...” Sam squeezed her shoulder affectionately. “Sometimes it can be a pretty rough trip from there to here. I know. I made it myself. How’re you freezing in?”

“I’m ...” Bron let a breath go, felt her back muscles, that had tightened almost to a cramp, relax a little. “Well, I ... guess you would understand ...”

A man ahead glanced back twice, then turned off around an immense sculptural shape, under red light, then was beyond it into shadow. “Some of it,” Sam said.

A woman, hands thrust deep in her pockets, walked into the darkness after him (Bron saw one bare elbow bend as a hand came out of her pocket, with three gold rings bright as steam-boat coals in the red light; then she was into darkness too). And they were past, too far, to see.

“Have you ever been in one of these places during off-hours?” Bron asked.

“Who hasn’t?”

“They’re so sad when nobody’s using them.”

“So’s an all-night cafeteria at the first-slot credit level.” (Which were the social-service food places where, despite your credit level, you had to be served.) “There’s one two blocks from here that gives as good—or almost as good—service in food as this place does in sex.”