Read Triton (Trouble on Triton) for Free Online

which, essentially, was what he had been avoiding talking about for the last quarter of an hour.) Lawrence said:
    “If you were asking for advice, which you’re not, I’d say why don’t you just leave it at that. If you don’t mind comments, which I must assume you don’t, because despite all my other comments, you’re still talking to me and haven’t merely wandered away—” Lawrence brought his fists together above the mountains—“I can only suspect that, because you haven’t left it at that—the only logically tenable conclusion—there probably is more to it than that. At least as far as you’re concerned. Choose—”
    Bron tapped Lawrence’s left fist.
    The fist (Bron thought: Perhaps it’s simply because Lawrence is my friend) turned over, opened: a scarlet foot soldier.
    “That’s you,” Lawrence said.
    Bron took the piece, looked around at the other side of the case, and began to pick the scarlet pieces from their green velvet drawer. He stopped with the piece called the Beast between his thumb and forefinger, regarded it: the miniature, hulking figure, with its metal claws and plastic eyes, was not particularly dumb: during certain gambits, the speaker grill beside the dice-cup drawer would yield up the creature’s roar, as well as the terrified shouts of its attackers. Bron turned it in his fingers, pondering, smiling, wondering what else he might say to Lawrence other than “yes”—
    “Freddie,” Lawrence said to the naked ten-year-old, who had wandered up to the table to stare (his head was shaved; his eyes were blue, were wide; he wore myriad bright-stoned rings, three, four, and five to a finger; and he was sucking the fore and middle-ones; the skin at one corner of his mouth was bright with saliva), “what are you staring at?”
    “That,” Freddie said around his knuckles, nodding at the board.
    “Why don’t you guys go to a nice, mixed-sex co-op, where there may be a few other children and, maybe, other people to take care of you?”
    “Flossie likes it here,” Freddie said. His cheeks went back to their slow pulsing as Flossie (a head
    [also shaved] and a half taller, eyes as wide [and as blue], hands heavy with even more rings) came up to stand just behind Freddie’s shoulders.
    Flossie stared.
    Freddie stared.
    Then Flossie’s brightly-ringed hand pulled Freddie’s from his mouth. “Don’t do that.”
    Freddie’s hand went down long enough to scratch his stomach, then came back up: two wet fingers, a near dozen rings between them, slid back into his mouth.
    Six months ago, Bron had just assumed that the two, who lived in adjacent rooms at the end of his corridor, were lovers; later, he’d decided they were merely brothers. Lawrence, with his ability to ferret out the gossipy truth, had finally revealed the story: Flossie, who was twenty-three and Freddie’s father, was severely mentally retarded. He had brought his ten-year-old son with him from a Cailisto-Port commune because there was a very good training and medical institute for the mentally handicapped here in Tethys. (The gemstones in those rings were oveonic, crystalline memory units, which, while they did not completely compensate for Flossie’s neurological defects, certainly helped; Flossie wore different rings for different situations. Freddie wore the rest. Bron had noticed Flossie often switched off with his son.) Who, or where, a mother was, neither seemed to care or know. From commune to co-op and back again, Flossie had raised Freddie since infancy. (“And he’s rather bright,” Lawrence had commented, “though with that finger-sucking, I think he suffers socially.”) Their names had been Lawrence’s idea (“An arcane literary reference as far beyond you as it is beyond them,” Lawrence had explained when Bron had requested explanation), codified when the two had started using them themselves. All right, what were their real names, then? someone had asked. Save their twenty-two digit