bored: why did you come here, he wanted to ask them. Who do you think you are? He preferred those who looked angry. That was what he wanted from them.
Then he noticed those who looked calm, interested, alert yet unamused. These women scared him.
In the back of the room stood some green-uniformed constables, male and female, carrying batons, red lights gleaming in the corner of their mirror spex, recording. Looking around the room, Erno located at least a half dozen of them. One, he saw with a start; was his mother.
He ducked behind a tall man beside him. She might not have seen him yet, but she would see him sooner or later. For a moment he considered confronting her, but then he sidled behind a row of watchers toward the back rooms. Another constable, her slender lunar physique distorted by the bulging muscles of a genetically engineered testosterone girl, stood beside the doorway. She did not look at Erno: she was watching Tyler, who was back to conversing with his dick.
“I’m tired of being confined,” Tyler’s dick was saying.
“You feel constricted?” Tyler asked.
He looked up in dumb appeal. “I’m stuck in your pants all day!”
Looking down: “I can let you out, but first tell me, are you a penis or a phallus?”
“That’s a distinction without a difference.”
“ Au contraire, little man! You haven’t been listening.”
“I’m not noted for my listening ability.”
“Sounds like you’re a phallus to me,” Tyler told his dick. “We have lots of room for penises, but Mama don’t allow no phalluses ’round here.”
“Let my people go!”
“Nice try, but wrong color. Look, son. It’s risky when you come out. You could get damaged. The phallic liberation movement is in its infancy.”
“I thought you cousins were all about freedom.”
“In theory. In practice, free phalluses are dangerous.”
“Who says?”
“Well, Debra does, and so does Mary, and Sue, and Jamina most every time I see her, and there was this lecture in We-Whine-You-Listen class last week, and Ramona says so too, and of course most emphatically Baba, and then there’s that bitch Nora…”
Erno spotted his mother moving toward his side of the room. He slipped past the constable into the hall. There was the rest room, and a couple of other doors. A gale of laughter washed in from the club behind him at the climax of Tyler’s story; cursing his mother, Erno went into the rest room.
No one was there. He could still hear the laughter, but not the cause of it. His mother’s presence had cut him out of the community of male watchers as neatly as if she had used a baton. Erno felt murderously angry. He switched on a urinal and took a piss.
Over the urinal, a window played a scene in Central Park, on Earth, of a hundred years ago. A night scene of a pathway beneath some trees, trees as large as the largest in Sobieski Park. A line of electric lights on poles threw pools of light along the path, and through the pools of light strolled a man and a woman. They were talking, but Erno could not hear what they were saying.
The woman wore a dress cinched tight at the waist, whose skirt flared out stiffly, ending halfway down her calves. The top of her dress had a low neckline that showed off her breasts. The man wore a dark suit like Erno’s. They were completely differentiated by their dress, as if they were from different cultures, even species. Erno wondered where Rosamund had gotten the image.
As Erno watched, the man nudged the woman to the side of the path, beneath one of the trees. He slid his hands around her waist and pressed his body against hers. She yielded softly to his embrace. Erno could not see their faces in the shadows, but they were inches apart. He felt his dick getting hard in his hand.
He stepped back from the urinal, turned it off, and closed his pants. As the hum of the recycler died, the rest room door swung open and a woman came in. She glanced at Erno and headed for one of the toilets. Erno went over to the counter and stuck his hands into the cleaner. The woman’s presence sparked his anger.
Without turning to face her, but watching in the mirror, he said, “Why are you here tonight?”
The woman looked up (she had been studying her fingernails) and her eyes locked on his. She was younger than his mother and had a pretty, heart-shaped face. “I was curious. People are talking about him.”
“Do you think men want you here?”
“I don’t know what the men want.”
“Yes. That’s the point, isn’t it? Are you learning anything?”
“Perhaps.” The woman looked back at her hands. “Aren’t you Pamela Megsdaughter’s son?”
“So she tells me.” Erno pulled his tingling hands out of the cleaner.
The woman used the bidet, and dried herself. She had a great ass. “Did she bring you or did you bring her?” she asked.
“We brought ourselves,” Erno said. He left the rest room. He looked out into the club again, listening to the noise. The crowd was rowdier, and more raucous. The men’s shouts of encouragement were like barks, their laughter edged with anger. His mother was still there. He did not want to see her, or to have her see him.
He went back past the rest room to the end of the hallway. The hall made a right angle into a dead end, but when Erno stepped into the bend he saw, behind a stack of plastic crates, an old door. He wedged the crates to one side and opened the door enough to slip through.
The door opened into a dark, dimly lit space. His steps echoed. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light he saw it was a very large room hewn out of the rock, empty except for some racks that must have held liquid oxygen cylinders back in the early days of the colony, when this place had been an actual oxygen warehouse. The light came from ancient bioluminescent units on the walls. The club must have been set up in this space years before.
The tincture still lent Erno an edge of aggression, and he called out: “I’m Erno, King of the Moon!”
“-ooo-ooo-ooon!” the echoes came back, fading to stillness. He kicked an empty cylinder, which rolled forlornly a few meters before it stopped. He wandered around the chill vastness. At the far wall, one of the darker shadows turned out to be an alcove in the stone. Set in the back, barely visible in the dim light, was an ancient pressure door.
Erno decided not to mess with it-it could open onto vacuum. He went back to the club door and slid into the hallway.
Around the corner, two men were just coming out of the rest room, and Erno followed them as if he were just returning as well. The club was more crowded than ever. Every open space was filled with standing men, and others sat cross-legged up front. His mother and another constable had moved to the edge of the stage.
“-the problem with getting laid all the time is, you can’t think!” Tyler was saying. “I mean, there’s only so much blood in the human body. That’s why those old Catholics back on Earth put the lock on the Pope’s dick. He had an empire to run: the more time he spent taking care of John Thomas the less he spent thinking up ways of getting money out of peasants. The secret of our moms is that, if they keep that blood flowing below the belt, it ain’t never gonna flow back above the shirt collar. Keeps the frequency of radical male ideas down!”
Tyler leaned over toward the drunk in the first row. “You know what I’m talking about, soldier?”
“You bet,” the man said. He tried to stand, wobbled, sat down, tried to stand again.
“Where do you work?”
“Lunox.” The man found his balance. “You’re right, you-”
Tyler patted him on the shoulder. “An oxygen boy. You know what I mean, you’re out there on the processing line, and you’re thinking about how maybe if you were to add a little more graphite to the reduction chamber you could increase efficiency by 15 percent, and just then Mary Ellen Swivelhips walks by in her skintight and-bam!” Tyler made the face of a man who’d been poleaxed. “Uh-what was I thinking of?”
The audience howled.
“Forty I.Q. points down the oubliette. And nothing, NOTHING’S gonna change until we get a handle on this! Am I right, brothers?”
More howls, spiked with anger.
Tyler was sweating, laughing, trembling as if charged with electricity. “Keep your son close! Penis, no! Phallus, si!”
