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

citizens will not even notice—
    “Excuse me,” a hoarse voice said. “You better let me have that, sir.”
    Bron looked up in the green light.
    Miriamne had stopped too.
    “You might as well hand it over ... sir.” The man was burly. Grizzled hair (and one diminutive nipple) pushed through the black web across his chest. He wore a black skullcap, black pants, shoes open in the front over hairy, hammered toes. (They would be open in the back too, Bron knew, over wide, horny heels.) He held a canvas sack in one hand (that arm was sleeved in black), and in the other (bare except for a complicated, black gauntlet, a-glitter with dials, knobs, small cases, and finned projections) he clutched crumpled flyers. “Some bunch in the u-1 printed up about fifteen thousand of these and dumped a batch at every goddamn exit. So all the e-girls have to go and turn pollution controllers!” He looked at Miriamne, who, with folded arms, now leaned one shoulder against the green tiles. Her sullen, preoccupied look had gone; it had been replaced by one of muted, but clear, hostility. “I mean you can’t have junk like this just blowing around in the streets.” His eyes came back to Bron’s. “So come on, let a girl do his job and hand it ...” His expression faltered. “Look, if you want to read it, just put it in your pocket and take it with you. There’s no restriction on having as many of ’em as you want in your own room—but we’re supposed to get ’em cleaned up off all publicly licensed property. Look, / don’t care if you read it. Just don’t leave it around in your commons, that’s all ... this isn’t some goddamn police state. Where do you think we are, Earth? / come from Earth. I used to be an enforcement-girl—well, we called
    ’em enforcement-boys, there—in Pittsburgh, before I came out here and got on the force. In Pittsburgh you could get hauled off for resocialization just for something like that—” He nodded toward the tiled wall where Miriamne was leaning. Someone had painted across it in day-glo red (which looked thoroughly unappetizing under the green light-strips):
    PLANT YOUR FEET ON IT FIRMLY! THIS ONE AIN’T GREEN CHEESE!
    Below it clumsy arrows pointed to the ground. (In black chalk, someone had scrawled across one side of the slogan: “that’s a bit difficult if they keep cutting the gravity” with several black arrows pointing toward the last, day-glo exclamation point.)
    “Believe me, in Pittsburgh, that’s just how they do.” (Enforcement-agents at Tethys had, fifteen years ago, been almost all women, hence the “e-girl” nickname. With changing standards, and the migrations of the recent decade and a half, by now the force was almost a third male. But the name persisted, and, as Chief Enforcement Officer Phyllis Freddy had once explained on a public-channel culture survey to a smiling interviewer, and thereby cooled the last humor out of a joke that had never been more than tepid:
    “Look, an e-girl is a girl, I don’t care if she’s a man or a woman!”) “Really. I mean, I know what I’m talking about. Now put it away or give it here, huh?”
    Bron glanced at Miriamne again (who was watching quietly), then handed over the flyer. It followed the others into the sack.
    ‘Thanks.” The black-clad agent pushed the papers down further. “I mean, you come out here to the moons and you take a job as a girl because it’s what you know how to do, it’s what you’ve been trained for—and believe me, it’s a lot easier here than it is in Pittsburgh ... or Nangking. I know ’cause I’ve worked in both—I mean you take the job because you want to be a girl—” He stepped by Bron, bent down, and swept up another handful from the papers fluttering along the ground—“and what do you end up? A garbage man!”
    Miriamne started walking again, arms still folded. Bron walked too.
    Blowing paper (and papers crumpled and crushed) echoed in the underpass.
    On the dark walk,