They passed a snaking bench where a number of women (and a scant handful of men) were seated. A man walking past hesitated, glanced, then sat near one of the women who, as if her motion were the completion of his, got up and walked away, to turn, seconds later, around the end of another bench where those seated were mostly men: her pace slowed, and she began surveying the seated figures as, moments before, the man who had prompted her to move had surveyed the figures on the bench where she had been. Here and there was the sound of faint laughter, or faint converse. Most, however, were silent.

“Around and around and around we go,” Sam said, and added his soft bass rumble to the drifting voices.

Coming toward them, hand in hand, wearing only a complex metallic vest and briefs, a woman laughed, and a man, naked except for a jeweled domino, pushed up on his forehead now, smiled.

The couple parted around Sam and Bron; the laughter drifted off behind them. “And suddenly,” Sam said, “for them, it’s all worth it.” He glanced back, added his own laughter again. People on the bench smiled.

Bron tried not to look away; and failed.

“Didn’t somebody advise you to stay away from places like this till after you got a little better acclimated?” Sam asked. “Bad counseling. It’s like going into a four-wall jai-alai tournament a week after you’ve had a broken leg set. I mean, even if you were the greatest player in the world before, it still can be a bit depressing.”

“It’s been six months since I ... I had my leg set. My counselor’s been telling me it’s well past time I got in there and gave it a try.”

“Oh.” Sam’s arm had loosened around her shoulder. “I see.”

The desperation had started again. “Sam, please. Lei me come live with you and your family. I wouldn’t be much bother. You’ve known me as a friend for almost a year; I’ll take the chance on your getting to know me as a lover.”

“I heard you the first time, sweetheart,” Sam said. “If you ask me again, I’ll have to give you a clear, firm, unambiguous answer. And that would only hurt your feelings. So do yourself a favor and cut it out.”

“You won’t ...” and felt her feelings rend as if knives turned in her liver. “Oh, why, Sam?”

“My women would never hear of it. We trade off, see, bringing the next sweet young thing into my harem. I choose one, they choose one. It’s their turn this week.”

“Sam, you’re playing with me!”

“That’s all you leave open ... You do remember where my commune was?—No, you don’t. That’s good. Because when you first spoke to me, I thought that was your idea of a joke.”

“Oh, you don’t ... you can’t—”

“Sweetheart, you’re reasoning from the converse. The sad truth is that I could—but I won’t. It’s that hard and that nasty. I’m your friend, but I’m not that good a friend, right now, tonight. The only advice I can give you is that even if it’s hard where you are now—and I know it can be—you’re still changing, still moving. Eventually, even from here, you’ll get to somewhere else. I know that too. Now come here—” and did not wait, but pulled her to him; and, in his arm’s, she felt herself start to cry, could not cry, felt herself start to scream, but could not do that either, felt herself start to collapse. But that was just silly. So she held onto him, thinking: Sam ... ! Sam ... !

An age later, Sam released her and, with his hands on her shoulders, moved her away. “All right. You’re on your own, lady. Sam’s just too big and black and lazy for all this rambling around. I’m going back downstairs, where it’s crowded. I’m out to get laid tonight. And I happen to be one of those guys who makes out better in the crush.” He smiled, patted her shoulder, turned. And was gone.

I can’t move, she thought. But moved, walking fairly normally, to one of the single seats cut into the side of a large, ceramic free-form.

Sam, she thought again; and again; then again; till the word became mysterious, alien, ominous, a single-syllable mantra. Then: ... Sam—? Somehow, on this hundredth, or hundred-thousandth repetition, it suddenly cleared her mind.

Why had she been approaching Sam?

Sam was no more a man than she was a ... No. She had to stop that thought; it could lead nowhere. Still, again, she had been about to sacrifice all her ideals, her entire plan, just for an ... emotional whim! Yet, while it had been happening, it had seemed those ideals were just what she had been pursuing ...

Sam?

That was ridiculous as the embarrassment and anger she had subjected herself to with that theater woman! Think! she thought: At one point there had been something she had thought she could do better than other women—because she had been a man, known firsthand a man’s strengths, a man’s needs. So she had become a woman to do it. But the doing, as she had once suspected and now knew, was preeminently a matter of being; and being had turned out to be, more and more, specifically a matter of not doing. And from the restrictions, subterranean and powerful forces seemed to have run wild in her that, as a result, threatened to corrupt everything she did want to do. In her work at the hegemony, in her friendships—with Lawrence, with Prynn—the force was apathy, tangible and inexorable as the ice-cascade crashing down the slope at the climax of an ice-opera. Then, whenever she reached a situation even near one in which her womanhood was at stake, all that had been surpressed welled up in such a torrent she could not tell desperation from resentment, desire from need, making her blurt stupidities and nonsense instead of what, a moment before ot a moment later, she would have known was rational response.

What was she trying to do? Bron asked herself. And found the question as clearing as Sam’s name a minute before. It had to do with saving the race ... no; something to do with saving or protecting ... men? But she was a woman. Then why ... ? She stopped that thought as well. Not her thoughts, but her actions were pursuing some logical or metalogical concatenation to its end. To try and ask, much less answer, any one of those questions would pollute, destroy, shatter it into a lattice of contradictions that would crumble on expression. She knew that what she wanted was true and real and right by the act of wanting. Even if the wanting was all—

A man had stopped a few feet away, to lean on an outcrop of the ceramic. He wasn’t looking at her, but she saw the position of his hand on the green-swirled glaze. The insult of it! she thought, with sadness and desperation. Why didn’t they just come up and slap you across the mouth? Wouldn’t it have been kinder, less damaging to what she was trying to protect? And he might be the one! she went on thinking. I simply have no way to guess, to ask, to find out. If I were to respond in any way, I would never know, because even if he was, any response from me would cause him to put that side of himself away forever as far as I’m concerned, become all pretended reason and rationality. He could come here, could sit and wait, could prowl and search, as she had once sat or prowled, searching for the woman who would know, who would understand. Men could do that. She had done it when she was a man, and had found, prowling or being prowled by, five hundred, five thousand women? But she had no way to show she knew, because any indication of knowledge denied that knowledge’s existence in her. And there was no way to overcome the paradox, unless there were an infinite number of such bars, such arenas, such runs, unless she could somehow interpose an infinite distance, a million times that between Earth and Triton, between herself and him, then wait for him to cross it, carry her back over it, as easily as Sam had carried her to Mongolia and—No! No, not Sam—