Floating Worlds (25 page)

“You won’t get in trouble, will you?” she said. “For bringing me here.”

He shook his head. “All the trouble will land on you.”

She looked up ahead of them. In their passage across the city, the ground seemed to flatten away from her, and now Saba’s compound was sinking down slowly into the clutter of large buildings along that part of the wall. They were passing the head of the lake. Boats rowed over it in lines, like soldiers.

“What are they fishing for?” She saw the nets in their wake, swollen fat with the black lake water.

Pedasen shook his head. “You ask too many questions. You’re just going to have to learn not to be so curious.”

She looked up at him. He was staring at the street just ahead of his feet. His silken cheeks were darker than hers, his eyes startlingly pale. Certainly his mother had been Earthish. In the street ahead of them, between high walls, Styth children were throwing a curved stick back and forth. She followed Pedasen down the grassy lane that led along the back wall of Saba’s compound and in the little slave door.

Boltiko’s house was full of screaming children. Paula let herself in the front door to the cluttered sitting room. Down the hall the prima wife’s voice sounded, shrill: “I don’t care what he did, I’ve told you again and again—” There followed the smack of a hand on a child’s bottom. In the hall a knot of five or six children packed the kitchen door, their backs to Paula. She went unseen into Boltiko’s bedroom, where David lay asleep on the bed, and took him away out the front door.

He woke while she was changing his clothes, and she lay on her bed nose to nose with him. His arms and legs flailed aimlessly and he heaved himself onto his side, as if he were trying to roll over. She kissed his head, capped in thick black hair. After a while, she realized there was someone behind her.

Saba was in the doorway. He said, “Where did you go?”

“Out.” She slid off the bed to her feet.

“I told you what I’d do if you did that.” He took off his belt. She wet her lips. He came around the bed, took her by the scruff of the neck, and whipped her with the doubled belt, six or eight times. It hurt. When he let her go she grabbed the bed to keep from falling.

“This isn’t the Earth,” he said. “You can’t do as you please around here. That was for your own good—if you go out in the street you’ll just be hurt.”

She sat on the bed, her hands in her lap. Standing in front of her he buckled on his belt again. He said, “I told you when you wanted to come here it wouldn’t be the kind of life you were used to.” His voice sounded above her head. She refused to look up at him. “You’d better get off your high branch. I won’t take your selfish anarchist act too long. Are you listening to me?”

“I hear you.”

“Why don’t you learn how to sew and make yourself some decent clothes? You look like a street-pig, you act like a street-pig, and I won’t take it. Understand? I have enough trouble. I won’t take any more from you.”

He walked out of the room. She put her head back and shut her eyes. She did not belong here. She had come here by mistake, by accident. The baby whimpered. She got up and took him down to the kitchen to feed him.

She put off leaving the compound again. Boltiko mixed little bowls of mush to feed David. “Just give him a little at first, in case it makes him sick.” The prima wife dipped up a bit of mashed fruit on her finger and ate it. She sighed, all her fat quaking. “I don’t know what I’m to do with Ketac. I hope he didn’t behave like this when he was in your world. Dakkar is such a perfect son.”

Pedasen came in, and the three cleaned Paula’s house. She told herself that was why she was not going out into the city again: the baby needed her, the house was dirty, Boltiko wanted to talk.

“Why don’t you use this room for a. nursery?” Pedasen said. He looked in the door to the empty room across the hall from hers. “There’s furniture over—yeow!”

She rushed after him into the room. “What’s wrong?”

“There was a kusin in here!” He pulled the window closed. She went up beside him and opened it again. Pedasen’s pale eyes were popping with excitement. He shut the window. “You can’t leave this open—it comes in through the window.”

She opened the window. “It comes in here to drink.”

“It will eat the toes off the baby.”

“It’s very shy. It won’t go near the baby.”

Pedasen muttered something. He rubbed his nose with his forefinger. She left the room, and he came after her to help her move the big cabinet in the sitting room.

The doors of the cabinet were divided into eight panels, inlaid with metal under a thick shiny glaze. “That’s the story of Capricornus,” he told her. “He was a hero—” He reached up to touch the top panel. “See? Here he is wrongfully accused and his father exiles him, and he goes on his wanderings. But he returns home in the end.”

She wiped the glossy surface of the door with her sleeve. In the panel at her eye-level a tiny man fought a lizard with a round badge on its breast. “What’s this?”

“That’s the dragon Jupiter.” His finger traced the blossom of the beast’s flaming breath. Now she recognized the planetary symbol on the disk. The figures were in low-relief under the glaze, realistic in the detail, even the little image of the man.

“I’m not keeping you from anything, am I?”

“Oh, no,” the eunuch said. “If the mem wanted me, she would ring the bell.”

“You’re hiding out,” she said.

“Not really.”

“Really.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said.

“No.”

“I’d work for you, if there was anything to do.”

“I know. It’s all right.”

“When the Akellar gets back,” he said, “he’ll probably put everybody to work.”

She leaned on the back of the swing couch. The chains skreed under her weight. “Where is he?” The couch swayed away from her, and she lifted her feet off the ground and swung with it.

“Half a block of the Tulan was blown down last watch. There was an awful riot.” Pedasen caught the swing. “He’s out looking it over. Next they’ll be breaking down the compound door.”

The baby cried, and they turned their heads to listen. Paula waited to see if David would quiet by himself, and after three or four yells he subsided. She leaned on the couch and swung back and forth. She felt like a ghost in this world, something these other people imagined for their own use: Pedasen to escape work, David to feed him, Saba to deal with the Committee. She had to stop leaving her life up to accident.

“The Tulan,” she said. “What’s that?”

“The rich district, across the city.”

“Take me there.”

Pedasen found her slave’s clothes: baggy white trousers and a white quilted tunic. They walked down to the lake and along the street that followed the shore. The watch was high. Lines of boats rowed across the black water, drawing their nets after them. Three oars to a side they crawled on the still lake surface. The street was busy with slaves going to and from the market on the city wall to her right. Pedasen led her down a steep lane between rows of tall old houses, smelling of fish.

“You’re asking for worse than a whipping,” he said once.

They cut through a part of the Varyhus, along a stretch of the factory fence, and came to the Tulan. Here it was quiet. Banks of white grass grew on either side of the path and in the lanes between the walled houses. She saw no one else, not even children, until they turned a corner and came to a broad stretch of rubble.

For two or three acres, broken concrete and plastic covered the ground. A cart stood in the street, half-full of debris. Two slaves were shoveling in the mess that littered the street. Other white slaves stooped and picked through the ruins. A bilyobio tree grew up at the edge of the street. Paula went over to it, watching a single file of Styths on the far side of the blown-up place. The rubble crackled when she stepped on it, gave way, and nearly dropped her. Pedasen grabbed her elbow.

“Paula.” He nodded at the Styths two hundred feet away. “That’s him.”

She stepped carefully over a broken wall, high as her knees. There was a puddle of melted plastic on the far side, still warm. The sharp edges of the trash cut her shoes. She saw something bright in the blackened crumbled concrete and picked up a metal buckle.

“Paula!” Pedasen hissed, behind her.

She showed him the buckle. The etched design was laid in with soot. “I’ll bet you this I can walk right up to him and he won’t even see me.”

“You’ll get your back peeled off.” His lips were pressed together, like Boltiko’s when somebody swore. She rolled the buckle into the cuff of her sleeve. Watching for things she could salvage from the junk, she crossed the ruin. A sweetish stench of acetone came from the burned ground. Pedasen followed her. At a big two-headed bilyobio tree in the middle of the place, three slaves had gathered to pass a jug of water around. She stopped near them.

“Give that over here,” Pedasen said, and the strange slaves handed him the jug. They were all watching the Styths.

“Find anything?” one said, low.

Pedasen shook his head. He jabbed his chin at Saba and his men, who were cutting across the rubble toward the next street. “How long has he been here?”

“Since the half-watch,” another slave said. They were all talking in murmurs. Paula looked up at the bilyobio. One stubby upper branch was split, but otherwise it seemed untouched by the explosion. The jug came around to her and she sipped the cool water. Saba was scanning the ground, his hands on his hips, and his face gripped with bad temper.

“Have they found anything?” she said.

“Two bomb casings,” a strange slave told her.

Another man took the jug from her. “They’d have found plenty, but Tssa’s men were here last watch cleaning up.” He grinned; he had no teeth in his upper jaw.

“Who is Tssa?” she asked.

Pedasen’s elbow slammed into her ribs. “Don’t ask questions.” To the others, he said, “She’s fresh, she still talks too much.”

Saba was coming closer, his men strung out behind him. His son Dakkar was among them. The slaves moved away from the bilyobio tree, hurrying in their quick stride, bending to search in the trash. Paula drifted over toward the Styths. She circled them once, coming within five feet of Saba. He kicked at the ground and black char flew in a spray. He looked straight at her without seeing her. She went slowly back toward the street, casting around on the ground for salvage, met Pedasen, and they started home.

She reached the compound, left her slave clothes with Pedasen in the slaves’ room of the Manhus, and retrieved David from Boltiko. When she went in the kitchen door of her house she could hear the sawing of the swing chains in the front room. She went down the hall to the archway. Saba was sprawled on the couch, her flute in his hands. He was trying to play it, but as hard as he blew over the mouthpiece he could not draw a note from it. Seeing her, he put the flute down.

“You’re lucky I don’t lose my temper easily.”

She laid the baby on the floor by the Capricornus cabinet and tucked his blanket around him. “This seems to be the only way I can get your attention.”

“I’ve been busy.” He took a strip of green recording tape out of his sleeve, and she went to the foot of the swing. “This came from the Earth while you were out running around like a whore.”

She took the tape and sat down on the swing with it in her hand. “Have you had it transcribed?”

“I’ve listened to it. There are about fifty questions on details and they’re complaining about something in the bond clause.”

She wound the tape into a coil. That was why he was keeping his belt on. She said, “You never come near me any more.”

He stirred. His eyes shifted away from her. “I don’t want to get you pregnant again.” He fussed with his mustaches. In her imagination she heard something stop, like a song stopping. She made herself admit that she had lost him. She looked quickly away before he saw it in her face.

“What are you going to do about that?” he said.

She put the tape on the couch. “I can’t tell until I read it. There’s no sense in worrying about it anyway before you stifle this street action against the treaty.”

“That’s not your business.”

“It is my business. If you can’t put this treaty over here, I might as well go back to the Earth. Do you know who’s doing it?”

He scowled at her. She faced him, expressionless. “Is it Tssa?”

On the floor by the cabinet the baby squealed. She went to look. He had wakened; he seemed happy enough staring at the shining cabinet door.

“What do you know about Tssa?” his father said.

“Not me. The slaves. The slaves see everything that happens. None of you ever notices them, but they’re everywhere.”

“What do they say about Tssa?”

“His men were there in the Tulan, before you saw the ruin. Is this attack on you or just the treaty?”

“Me. Do you know how I received my call?”

She shook her head. He stood. Relieved of his weight the couch swayed off in a parabola. She went to catch her flute before it fell.

“I had two older brothers. They murdered my father. I and Tanuojin came after them and killed them.” His back was to her. Soot powdered his sleeves. “It was the hardest time in my life. We were outlaws here, nobody could help us. For forty watches, whenever one of us slept, the other had to be standing guard. That was when I knew I was called to follow my father. To be the Akellar.”

“Why did they kill him?”

“With Yekaka there was always some reason.”

She looked down at the flute in her hands.

“Anyway, my oldest brother left two sons, both young, very young, and like a fool I let them stay in Matuko. Tssa is the elder. I’m almost sure he’s engineering the trouble, but if I take him on suspicion and I’m wrong, it will only make the thing worse, and I can’t get a grip on him. He’s too cautious.” He made an impatient gesture. “Or he’s innocent.”

She took the flute apart. The box was on the table under the window. “I look like a slave. I could go right into Tssa’s house. Find out whatever you have to know.”

“Don’t be a fool. I need you for this other work, and he’d catch you. He’s not stupid.”