Read Online Triton (Trouble on Triton) by Samuel R. Delany - Free Book Online Page A

months), Bron and Sam were pounding each other’s shoulders and laughing and congratulating themselves and turning to congratulate Lawrence and, of course, they would all get together tomorrow evening and take up where they’d left off.
    As Bron walked down the corridor toward his room, he decided warmly that the trouncing he had given the old pirate, even if it had taken Sam’s help to do it, had made the evening worth it. At his door, he stopped, frowned toward the door opposite.
    He hadn’t even asked Sam how Alfred was. Should he knock now and find out? A sudden memory of one of the few things like a personal conversation he’d ever had with Alfred returned: once Alfred had actually taken Bron to a restaurant (recommended by Flossie, who had had it recommended to him by a friend of Freddie’s) which turned out to cater almost entirely to well-heeled (and rather somber) nine—to thirteen-year-olds. (The younger ones were simply swathed in fur!) Only a handful of adolescents even near Alfred’s age were present, and they all seemed to be overlooking the place with patent good will and palpable nostalgia. Bron was the single adult there. During dinner Bron had been rambling on about something or other when Alfred leaned across the table and hissed, “But I don’t want relationships! I don’t want friendships! I want sex—sometimes. That’s what I’m doing at Serpent’s House. Now get off my back!” Two sexually unidentifiable children, hands locked protectively around their after-dinner coffee bulbs, turned away small, bald, brown faces to muffle smiles in their luxuriant collars. Yet he still considered Alfred his friend, because Alfred, like all his others, had come to him, still came to him, asking that he do this, or could he lend him that, or would he mail this coupon to that advertiser, or this letter of protest about what some other had sent him, pick up this or that on the way home, or where should he throw that out and, yeah, sure you can have it if you want it. With varying amounts of belligerence, Bron complied to these requests (to keep peace, he told himself at first), only to discover that, in his compliance, he valued the relationship—friendship, he corrected himself (because he was thirty-seven, not seventeen). I suppose, Bron thought, standing in the hall, I understand him, which has something to do with it. I certainly understand him better than I understand Lawrence. Or Sam. (Or that woman ... ?
    Again her face returned to him, turning in delightful laughter.) He turned to his door. As far as knocking on Alfred’s? If Alfred wasn’t all right, Bron understood him enough to know that he wouldn’t want to be caught at it. And if he was, he wouldn’t want to be disturbed in it. (If he’s all right, Bron thought, he’s probably sleeping. That’s what I’d do with my all-right time if I had as little of it as that poor kid.) Bron pushed open his own door and stepped into a dimly lighted room, with an oval bed (that could expand to hold three: despite Alfred’s secretiveness, there was nothing in the co-op house rules that said you couldn’t ball as many people as you liked as long as you did it in your own room), a reader, a microfiche file drawer, a television screen and two dials below it for the seventy-six public channels and his three private ones, two windows (one real, which looked out on the alley behind the building, the other a changeable, holographic diarama: blue curtains were drawn across both), clothes drawers, sink drawers, and toilet drawers in the wall, plastic collars here and there on the blue rug from which, at the push of a switch in the control drawer, inflatable chairs would balloon. It was a room like Alfred’s room, like Lawrence’s, like Sam’s, indeed like some dozen others he had lived in on one world and three moons; a comforting room; a room like ten thousand times ten thousand others.
    At four twenty-seven in the morning, Bron woke suddenly, wondering