Triton (Trouble on Triton) Read Online Free PDF Page B

micro-breeze, disturbing the tops of micro-trees.
    “There was this man, you see, from some sect she called the Dumb Beasts—I mean, if there is such a sect. But considering all that happened, how do you tell if any of it was real? / don’t know how big their endowment was ... and maybe the ‘endowment’ was part of the theater’ too.”
    “Well, her name is certainly familiar—”
    “Is it?” Bron asked in the quiet commons. “The Spike?”
    “Very.” Lawrence assembled the astral cube: the six six-by-six plastic squares, stacked on brass stilts, made a three dimensional, transparent playing space to the right of the main board, on which all demonic, mythical, magical, and astral battles were enacted. “You don’t follow such things. I do. I even think I’ve heard something about the Dumb Beasts—they’re the fragments of some bizarre sect that used to go by just a very long number?”
    “She told me some nonsense like that.”
    “I can’t remember where I heard about them—that’s not the sort of thing I do follow—so I can’t swear to the validity of your beasts for you. But the Spike, at any rate, is quite real. I’ve always wanted to see one of her productions. I rather envy you—There: That’s all together. Would you get the cards out of the side drawer, please?”
    Bron looked around the side of the vlet case, pulled out the long, narrow drawer. He picked up the tooled leather dice-cup; the five dice clicked hollowly. Thrown, three would be black with white pips, one transparent with diamond pips, and the fifth, not cubic, but scarlet and icosahedral, had seven faces blank (Usually benign in play, occasionally they could prove, if you threw one at the wrong time, disastrous); the others showed thirteen alien constellations, picked out in black and gold. Bron set the cup down and fingered up the thick pack. He unwrapped the blue silk cloth from around it. Along the napkin’s edge, gold threads embroidered:
    —the rather difficult modulus by which the even more difficult scoring system (Lawrence had not taught him that yet; he knew only that 0 was a measurement of strategic angles of attack [over different sorts of terrain N, M, and A] and that small ones netted more points than large ones) proceeded. As he pulled back the blue corner, two cards slid to the table. He picked them up—the Wizard of Rocks and the Child Empress—and squared them with the deck. “Lawrence, the point is, even if he wasn’t a member of their company—I mean, there was a woman member of the sect who definitely was with them—unless that was just makeup too. It was as though, suddenly, I couldn’t trust anything ...”
    Lawrence opened the drawer on the other side of the case and took out a handful of the small, mirrored and transparent screens (some etched with the same, alien constellations, some with different), set them upright beside the board, then reached back in for the playing pieces: carved foot soldiers, mounted men, model army-encampments; and, from this same drawer, two miniature cities, with their tiny streets, squares, and markets: one of these he put in its place in the mountains, the second he set by the shore. “I don’t see why you’re so busy dissecting all this—” Lawrence took up one red foot soldier, one green one, sat back in his chair, put the pieces behind his back—“when it seems to me all that’s happened is, in an otherwise dull day, you’ve had—from the way you described it—something of an aesthetic experience.” (Bron was thinking that seventy-four-year-olds should either get bodily regeneration treatments or not sit around the co-op common rooms stark naked—another thought he decided to suppress: it was Lawrence’s right to dress or not dress any way he felt like. But why, he found himself wondering, was it so easy to suppress some negative thoughts while others just proliferated?—like all those that had been forming about that theater woman, the Spike: