Free Triton (Trouble on Triton) by Samuel R. Delany Page B

going to ask her her number: you look it up. She’s been bothered enough today already.” He glanced at Miriamne, who was looking at him now, if a bit blankly. “She’s a cybralogician and for some, bird-brained reason neither of us understands or appreciates, she’s been sent to—”
    “Whom do you wish to speak to in Personnel?” the voice answered with understandable testiness.
    “You will do.” (Miriamne could only hear his side of the conversation.) “This whole nonsense has grown up because responsibilities have been shuttled and shunted around for I’m sure a week or more. And I—that is, Bron Helstrom, in Metalogics—” Once more he rattled off his number: “... I’ll assume you have that now, so that you know where this complaint is coming from—I don’t intend to get lost in the shuffle. You’ve sent this woman into Metalogics, a department that can make full use of neither her training nor her talent. This is not the first time this has happened; it’s the sixth. That is ridiculous, a waste of everybody’s time, an interruption in everyone’s work. Now you decide who ought to know, and you go tell them—” He heard the sharply drawn-in breath, then the click of the connection broken—“and if anyone wants to know where the complaints came from—now, get it this time:” Once more he gave his name and number to the dead, red bead. “Now, think about that, pignoli-brain, before you make the next person’s life miserable by sending them to do a job they aren’t trained for. Good-bye.” He hung up, thinking: The “pignoli-brain” was for cutting him off. Still, he decided, he’d gotten his point across. He looked at Miriamne (with the ghost of belligerence playing through his smile): “Well, I guess we’ve made our point—for what little it’ll do.” He cocked his head.
    The same ghost played through hers. She rubbed her neck with one finger. Her nails were short and chrome-colored. Her lips were full and brown. “I’m a cybralogist,” she said. “As far as I know, there’s no such thing as a cybralogician.”
    Bron laughed. “Oh. Well, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve never even heard of a ‘cybralog.’”
    “I’ve heard of metalogics ... ?”
    While Bron laughed, inside the ghost momentarily became real. “Look,” he said. “I can either tell you about metalogics and, by tomorrow, we can probably have you doing something that isn’t too dull, if not useful.” He turned his hands up. “Or we can have some coffee and just ...” He shrugged—“talk about other things. I mean I know how exhausting these hurry-up-and-wait mornings can be. I had to go through my share before ending up here.”
    Her smile became a short (but with that sullen ghost still playing through) laugh. “Why don’t we have the coffee and you can tell me about metalogics.”
    Bron nodded. “Fine. I’ll just get—” getting up.
    “May I sit in this—?”
    “Sure. Make yourself comfortable. How do you take your—?”
    “Black,” she said from the sling chair, “as my old lady,” and laughed again (while he reached into the drawer at his knee and dialed. One plastic bulb, sliding out, hit his knuckles and burned). “That’s what my father always used to say.” She put her hands on her knees. “My mother was from Earth—Kenya, actually; and I’ve been trying to live it down ever since.”
    Bron smiled back, put one coffee bulb on the desk, reached down for the other and thought: Typical u-1 ... always talking about where they come from, where their families started. His own parents had been large, blond, diligent, and (after years of working as computer operators on Mars, when their training on Earth, outmoded almost before their Martian emigration, had promised them glorious careers in design) fairly sullen. They were in their midforties when he’d come along, a final child of five. (He was pretty sure he was a final child.) Was that, he wondered again, why he liked