Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

4. La Geste d'Helstrom

4. La Geste d'Helstrom I think that a philosophical gnat might claim that the gnat society is a great society, or at least a good society, since it is the most egalitarian, free, and democratic society imaginable. KARL R. POPPER, Objective Knowledge The melancholy left after three more hour's sleep. The energy (and vividness) remained all the way to work, till, by three o'clock (he'd skipped lunch), when he was going over the Day Star's preprogram specifications yet again, it hit him: P would have to intersect (ess than half of Not-P (as well as pieces of Q, R, and S, while cleaving T); also it must surround more than half of it, and be tangent to it at not less than seven (which had been self-evident) and not more than forty-four (which had been the bitch!) points. That was getting somewhere. Immensely pleased, he marched to Audri's office with his find. "Great," Audri said, looking up from her desk. "For a reward you get a two-week vacation." Bron said, "Mmmm?" Audri leaned back and put her hands behind her head. "I said you get two weeks off,starting tomorrow." "I don't under—" Suddenly he remembered some vague thing she'd said yesterday about "threatening": "Hey, look, now! That girl got another job. I mean, I saw her, later, and she's all right!" Audri frowned. "What girl are you—Oh, for crying out loud, Bron! Don't give me any of your hard-time crap." Her hands came down on the desk. "I can't take it today. People are being laid off all over the whole hegemony. If you'd been at lunch, you'd've heard!" "Well, I didn't want lunch," he protested, automatically. "I wanted to work. That's how I got the—" 117 118 Trouble on Triton She stopped him with lightly closed lids. "Look." They opened. "You can either take a two-week vacation with eight percent reduction in credit for the duration—" "Eight percent!" "—or quit. Half a dozen people have. I've got to take ten days off myself. And, I've got to think of something to do with the kids." Although Bron liked Audri, he didn't like her three children. When, from time to time, they came to the office, he found them precocious , presumptuous, and obdurate. She lived with them in a gay, women's co-op (not a commune—room, food, and work arrangements were friendly but formal) in an unpretentious spiral tower a unit from Bron's own squat, blocky building. With none of the laminated ostentation of Philip's multisexed, on-the-Ring dwelling, nor the insistently tatty quaintness of a u-1 sector domicile, it was the most comfortable home he had visited on Tethys. All three visits, in fact had left him strangely relaxed and, strangely, depressed—but it had taken him three visits to realize they were two reactions. Bron swallowed (and forgot) his next protest. "We don't have to get hysterical yet, I suppose," Audri said. "It's only eight percent—this time. And just for two weeks. They want to make everything look like it's working at full capacity, only that people just all happen to be off doing something else." "What sort of logic—or metalogic—is that?" "I have three degrees in this subject and am in the midst of getting another one—which is three more than you—and I don't have the foggiest idea." Audri leaned her palms on the desk edge. "Look. Just get out of here. If you come up with any more on Day Star this afternoon , shove it under Phil's or my door. But don't bother us. Okay? And don't come in tomorrow." Wonderingly, he said (he hadn't meant it to, but it sounded a little belligerent): "Okay . . ." and returned to his office. He thought many confused thoughts, and didn't even bother to open the Day Star folder again. The energy was gone by the time he returned to Serpent's House. Sitting in the commons, alone in a conversation niche, he reread the flyer picked up that morning from the booster-booth's floor: "THESE THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN YOUR CITY!!!" But, as he absorbed each political atrocity, he kept thinking of La Geste d'Hehtrom 119 other things...