Floating Worlds (37 page)

Paula was watching Tanuojin’s face. His mouth shut tight, the corners hidden under his mustaches. Wu-wei nodded to him.

“There’s a difference between law and justice, you know, which it might profit you to discover. This court is ended.” He got up and left the room.

Saba put his hands on the arms of his chair and pushed himself up onto his feet. “He’s an anarchist. What did you expect?”

Tanuojin was staring at the judge’s door, his hands on his hips, and his elbows cocked out. He said several coarse words in Styth and made for the rail. The Martians were putting away their papers. Chi Parine had his back to Paula. She followed the Styths out. Behind their backs, she finally allowed herself to smile.

The Interplanetary Hotel, where Sybil Jefferson was staying, was plainer and smaller than the Palestine. People sat reading in the chairs scattered around the lobby, in among the banana plants and the racks of hourlies and candy. The Styths sauntering into the hotel cut short all talk and turned every head in the room. Paula kept a tight grip on David’s hand. Whenever he saw a dog, he wanted to kill it, provided Saba was there. They went through an air door into a curving hallway.

“I don’t understand why we’re coming here,” Tanuojin said.

“She did us a favor,” Saba said. The walls of the hallway were painted with stylized jungle plants and flowers. David lagged, and Paula stopped to let him look. The two men went on around the curve.

David cried, “What’s that?” He rushed to the wall, reaching for a monkey coyly painted among the leaves.

“It’s a monkey. Something like a kusin.”

Saba came back around the curve, picked David up, and hauled her off by one arm down the hallway. “I told you not to bring him.” She turned her arm out of his grasp. They went into a bright room opening off the inside curve.

Tanuojin stood on the far side of a pair of bright yellow couches, squinting in the glaring light. Saba put David on his feet. Jefferson crossed to meet Paula. She wore a tomato-red tunic and red pants; she looked like a fireplug. “Mendoza,” she said, “don’t scold, I’m having the lights turned down. Hello, Akellar.” She folded over at the waist, eye to eye with David, and her voice rose to a falsetto. “Well, hello! I know who you are.”

David blinked at her, his mouth open. Saba said, “He doesn’t speak the Common Speech.” The child edged toward him, reaching for his father’s hand. Paula looked beyond Jefferson at the three people sitting on the couches. Abruptly the lights dimmed to a half-glow.

David had Saba firmly by the hand. The big man told him Sybil’s name. “This is the woman your mother worked for, before she came to me.”

“Here,” Sybil said. “I’ll bet I can do something you can’t do.”

Paula, behind her, could not see what Sybil did, but David shrieked with laughter. “Mama, look!” Jefferson straightened, turning her head. Her right eye was white and blind as an egg. David let go of his father and gripped Jefferson’s arm.

“Do it again!”

Jefferson chuckled. Paula said, “Sybil, you are gross.”

“Come meet my guests.” Sybil crooked her arm through Paula’s. She smelled like milk. “We were just talking about the Akellar’s extraordinary grasp of law.”

“For a Styth,” Tanuojin said.

All three strangers were members of the Council, a man and a woman from Luna and a man from Venus. Paula began to see Jefferson’s purpose in bringing the Styths here. She shook a series of hands and introduced the Council members to Saba, using all of his titles she could remember. Jefferson brought them each a tall fizzing glass.

“Where did you study law, Miss Mendoza?” asked the Council-woman from Luna.

Paula shook her head. “Nowhere. I did a flash reading on the way here.” She watched David, who was following Jefferson around. “Yekka is the lawyer.”

“It was quite a display, too,” said the man from Venus, hearty. “Chi Parine is no amateur.”

Tanuojin never even looked in his direction. “I have a good memory,” he said to the empty air.

Saba held his glass out to Paula. “It was a piece of theater. Bring me another of these.”

“Yes, too bad you were playing to the wrong audience.” She gave him her glass and went around the couch to the table against the wall where Jefferson had gotten the drinks. On a table covered with a white cloth were several rows of plastic bottles. She fished ice-balls out of a bucket. Jefferson came up to her side and took a package of biscuits from the back of the table.

“Thank you for coming, Mendoza.”

“Thank Saba.”

“Your son is his image.” Jefferson poured salted biscuits into a hotel dish and went off across the room. Tanuojin was still refusing the attentions of the Venusian and the Lunar woman. Jefferson stood talking to Saba and eating biscuits. The half-light buried the edges of the room in shadows. Paula filled two glasses with ice and whiskey and took them across the room and gave one to Saba.

“Have a cookie,” Jefferson said.

“Where is David?” She looked around the room for him.

“Leave him alone,” Saba said. “Ever since that thing with the dog you’ve been all over him.” He fished an ice-ball out of his glass and ate it.

“You’ve got fourteen others.”

The third Council member, the man from Luna, took the last of Jefferson’s biscuits. “Does he play chess?” He nodded over his shoulder toward Tanuojin. Elaborately unimpressed, he looked up, up at Saba. “What’s an Akellar?”

Jefferson turned to Paula. “What dog?”

Paula sipped her whiskey, her eyes on Tanuojin. “Nothing.” Thin as a withy, the tall Styth leaned against the wall, thumbing his mustaches flat. The Venusian’s hearty voice boomed.

“Actually, strangely enough, the best schools in the system are on the Earth.”

“Why is that strange?” Tanuojin said. Jefferson raised her head, her pale eyes sharp.

“The anarchists have no respect for education,” the hearty man said.

“Maybe that’s why their schools are so good,” Tanuojin said.

The Venusian fished cigarettes out of the pocket of his tunic. His hands busy, he said, “Is that some kind of joke?”

Tanuojin was facing him, but his white eyes glanced toward Jefferson. He slid his hands under his belt. “The anarchists have respect for nothing. They’ll do anything they have to do to keep the rest of you dancing in their act.”

Saba said, in Styth, “Why don’t you shut up?”

Tanuojin straightened away from the wall. “You know why we’re here—she’s trading on—”

“Just shut up when you’re in her place drinking with her and eating with her.”

“I’m not—”

“I am.”

Tanuojin slouched against the wall, sulky, his head to one side. Next to Paula, Sybil Jefferson looked from Styth to Styth, keen as a fox. Paula realized she understood them: she spoke Styth. The Venusian’s match clicked into a little burst of flame.

“It’s a riddle,” Saba said to the Venusian. “Unfortunately riddles don’t translate very well from one language to another. What is that?”

“Cigarettes,” the Venusian said. He held out the package. “Have one?”

Saba went over to the couch and the Venusian showed him how to smoke. He maneuvered the cigarette in his claws, fascinating the Lunar woman, who was slightly drunk. Paula looked for David.

Beside her, Jefferson said, “They couldn’t have done better if they’d been coached.”

Tanuojin was over at the bar, his back to the room. Paula said, “That won’t work too often, Sybil.”

“Just once,” Jefferson said.

“Where’s Mitchell Wylie?”

“He left the Planet. Apparently for security reasons.” Jefferson moved around to put her back to Tanuojin, ten feet away. “What happened?” Tanuojin was watching them. Paula kept herself from a shrug, a movement of the hand, anything that might signal him.

“The obvious. Parine tried to ambush us. Dick tripped, for once.”

“What else?”

Paula raised her eyes again, over the fat woman’s shoulder. Saba caught her glance and held his glass out. She stooped to catch David as he passed her.

“Here. Take this to Papa.” She gave him the glass in her hand.

“What else happened?” Jefferson said, when Paula straightened.

“I just told you, Sybil.”

“Why, suddenly, is Richard oracularly vague on the subject of Tanuojin?”

Relieved, Paula smiled at her. That settled her suspicions. “Ask him,” she said, and went off to make herself two more drinks.

In the morning, on the way to the entry port to leave for home, she bought an hourly. The Council had reconsidered the question of Venus 14 and withdrawn the order to send a peacekeeping force in to settle the chronic civil war in the giant dome. Paula folded the hourly and put it in her jacket pocket. At the entry port, eighteen or twenty people were marching up and down with ribbon banners, calling the Styths names. A vitriolic anti-Styth pamphlet she took from one of them had been printed by the Sunlight League, and wore their emblem in the upper right-hand corner of the cover: a radiant star.

The air of the Empire’s heart-city smelled like grease. The darkness made Paula uneasy and she stayed close by Saba in the street. She kept having the feeling that someone was following them. Her ears hurt from listening behind them through the roar of the city. They went along the crowded street toward the mid-city gate, where they were to meet Tanuojin.

He was standing just outside the door, Marus and two others of his watch behind him. As usual he and Saba met with an embrace. Paula turned to look up and down the street. People in Vribulo walked faster than in other places. The free locks of the Vribulit clubbed hair swayed like tails behind them. All she saw in one direction was a mass of hurrying backs and in the other a mass of hurrying faces. Tanuojin sent his men to the Barn, and he and Saba and Paula started across the city to the Akopra.

“Isn’t your Akopra House finished yet?” Paula asked him.

“Yes.”

She was walking between them, breaking into a jog now and then to keep up. “Then why go to this Akopra, if they’re so bad?”

“They may have somebody I can use.”

She tucked her hands into the muff. It had been Illy’s but Illy had given it to her as a homecoming present. They turned into a lane between high buildings, and behind them a man shouted something. She glanced over her shoulder. A knot of men was coming after them. She grabbed Saba’s arm. He and Tanuojin stopped. Another pack of Styths was blocking the narrow way ahead of them. One of these walked forward. His shirt was spangled with bits of metal. His face looked as if it had been cut to pieces and sewn back together again.

Saba shoved her. “Get out of the way. Run.”

She backed away from them. The man with the scarred face stopped; she knew it was Ymma, and his ruined face was Tanuojin’s work.

Saba said, low, “Keep moving.” He lunged at Ymma.

The two packs of men rushed together, like two hands clapping. Paula ran to the fence along the alley, looking for a way through them. Their reek made her heart pound. She could not see Saba or Tanuojin in the fighting. Sliding along the wall, she headed for the street. An arm hooked around her neck. She was hoisted off her feet, the crooked arm strangling her. She wrenched around and slid out of the grasp but someone else caught her.

“Hold her—”

She squirmed uselessly in a pinion grip. A hand yanked her head up by the hair. Someone snarled in her ear. “Watch. This is what happens to people who defy us.” She bit her lip to keep from crying out. Ymma’s men clogged the alleyway. Five feet from her they had Saba down on his knees, with his belt around his chest pinning his arms down. He was rigid, coiled; if they had let him go he would have shot up like a spring. Tanuojin lay on the ground. Ymma and two of his men were kicking him. She whined, and the hand in her hair twisted so hard tears ran down her cheeks. She heard bone crackle; she saw Tanuojin’s eyes close. They went on trampling him long after he began to bleed. At last Ymma stood back, signaling to the other men to stop.

Saba said nothing. He raised his head and gave Ymma an instant’s glance and turned his gaze back to Tanuojin. Ymma gave a sharp order. His men surged off along the alleyway. They carried Paula with them, out to the street, tucked like barter under one arm. A hand pressed stifling over her face. She fought for breath. Abruptly they dropped her and ran off along the street.

She gained her feet again, gasping in the rancid air. All along the street, people wheeled to watch Ymma’s men run by. She went back into the alley. Saba knelt beside Tanuojin. On the ground behind him lay his broken belt. The ground was covered with blood. Tanuojin’s head lay in a great puddle of it. She squatted down and put out her hand toward him, and Saba caught her arm.

“No. Don’t touch him. Find out where Ymma goes.”

She got up and trotted back to the street. Ymma and his men were nowhere in sight. She loped up the street in the direction they had gone, looking down the side streets. The thick stream of passers-by slowed her. Ahead, near the curve, where the street turned up, she saw a dozen men all traveling together, and she quickened her step.

In the dark she could not tell from such a distance if that band was Ymma’s or not. They turned into a side street, and she ran through an alley and climbed a fence and jumped down into another trunk street, which brought her much closer to them. Now she could see the bits of metal on one man’s shirt, and she went after them at a flat run.

Above her head Upper Vribulo stretched like a roof in the darkness. On the black lake half a mile from her a boat floated upside down; its bow light gleamed on the water. Ymma and his men walked up the curve toward the lake shore and turned to follow it. She realized where they were going. She went along another street, keeping them in sight on the curved wall of the city, and followed them that way down to the rAkellaron House.

They circled around to go in through a side door, avoiding the Barn. She was tired, and she had never been inside the House. Warily she went up to the door. The building loomed over her, large even for Styths. She went in the door and saw Ymma and his men at the far end of a long dim hallway, going through another door. When they had all disappeared, she ran down the length of the hall, her feet pattering on the stone floor. That door opened on a stairway.

She was afraid to go farther. The stone walls around her chilled her to the bone. She went back outside and waited awhile, to see if anyone came out, but no one did. After about half an hour, she went around the House to the Barn.

Saba was in Tanuojin’s office, sitting on the desk drinking whiskey. He watched her come in and shut the door.

“How is he?” she said.

“He’s bad.” The big Styth set his bottle down. “He’s still bleeding. I didn’t think he could be hurt that bad any more.”

She went to the desk and took the bottle. “Ymma went to the House.” The liquor burned her throat.

“Damn him.” Saba slapped his knees. “I knew he wouldn’t dare do that without help.”

“Is Machou behind it?”

“Probably.”

She drank another gulp of the whiskey. “What’s going to happen?”

“I’ll call Ymma down, next watch, and get Machou on my back, and Tanuojin won’t be there to step in for me. I’ll end up six places down the rank, if I’m lucky. And kicked to pieces.”

He took the bottle back and drank, full-throated. She watched the level of the liquor fall. He was afraid, and his fear made her cold. She went through the office to the little room.

Tanuojin lay on his back in the bed, wrapped in the blankets. He was profoundly asleep. His face was swollen shapeless. Saba came in past her and bent over him.

“He’s stopped bleeding.” He took her by the shoulder and turned her around. “Come on.”

There were two time meters on the wall of the middle room of the office, one for Yekka and one for Vribulo, which read forty-two minutes into the low watch. She hadn’t even heard the bells ring. She walked up and down the room past the computers.

“There has to be something we can do.”

“Yes. I can tear Ymma apart, before they maul me.”

She wheeled around toward him, her temper rising. “Stop talking as if it were certain. There has to be some way we can come out of this on top.”

“You don’t have to fight.”

“If I did I wouldn’t give up before it even starts.”

He pushed a stack of tapes off the top of a cabinet and sat down on it, staring at her down his long aristocratic nose. She heard the pulses banging in her ears. Her fist was clenched. Finally she looked away. “All right. I’m sorry.”

“If you help me maybe we can do something.”

“What?”

“Go into the House and look around for me. See who’s in this.”

She gathered her breath. “I will.”

“Good girl,” he said. “I’ll go stir up the flocks.”

The steps up to the front of the House were like ledges. Her legs began to ache before she was halfway to the porch. The broad expanse of concrete was nearly empty of people. The double doors into the House stood open. She went into an entryway, blinking in the dark. The wall on her right glinted. Twelve feet high, it was covered with Styth letters set in gold into the stone. She realized that was the Gold Wall, decorated with the names of the rePriman.

She was wearing slave clothes, a white scarf tied over her hair, and the two men standing guard just inside the entryway never even looked at her. She started up the steep stairs. Saba had told her to go to the third floor, the Prima Suite, where Machou lived. Two men passed her, coming down, one of them Ymma’s man. They ignored her. The stairs ended at the third-floor landing. Even before she opened the door she could hear the roar of voices in the hall of the Prima Suite.

It was packed from wall to wall with men. Half of them wore the red chevron badge of the Uranian Patrol. Machou was captain of the patrol. She hung back, her breath stuck in her lungs, until she saw there were slaves among them. She went slowly in among the Styths, catching snatches of their talk. Several doors opened off either wall of the long, straight hallway, but the men all kept glancing at the first door on the right, so she knew that was where Machou was. They sounded impatient to leave. She wandered among them, watching the door they all watched. One of the other slaves suddenly leaned over to look her in the face. She turned away from him and he went off. Nervously she followed him away with her eyes.

The door behind her burst open, and she wheeled around. The patrolmen around her straightened to stand at respect, their arms at their sides. The man who came into the hall also wore the red chevron. Over his shirt a gold filigree collar hung, covering his shoulders and chest. He was flawlessly handsome, as beautiful as Illy. She looked him over, admiring him. From the room he had just left came Machou’s harsh voice. The door shutting cut it off.

She glanced around her at the white, moving slaves. The one who had remarked her was talking to another slave, and both of them turned and looked at her. She went hastily out of the Prima Suite, following the handsome man down.

She stayed one flight above him. He stopped on the second-floor landing to meet somebody. Higher on the stair, she went to the rail and leaned out, trying to see who it was. All she could see of him was the top of his head and his gold covered shoulders.

One of them said, “Matuko is out tearing the place up. I take it Ymma did his part?”

The other answered, “Yes—he says. You know about Tanuojin’s little kink, don’t you?”

“I saw him cut to the bone once, and he never bled a drop. Are you fighting Saba?”

Over her head, the door opened, and feet clanged on the landing. She went on down the stairs, through the several patrolmen waiting in the handsome man’s train. Absently, they shifted to let her pass through them. She went by the two men standing face to face on the platform where the stair turned corner. The second stranger was older than Saba; he stood with his head thrust forward.

The handsome man was saying, “I know what I can do, and I can’t whip Saba.”

“Even with Ymma to soften him up?” the other said.

“Ymma will only give him exercise. He’s new back from space, he’ll be in perfect condition. He’s strong as a motor anyway. This one is yours. I told Machou already.”

She was by them and no longer heard him. Higher, on the stairs above the landing, a voice called sharply, “Stop that slavewoman!” She broke into a run, going down the stairs two and three steps at a time. The sentries were dozing. She got through the door onto the open porch just ahead of them.

In the open they could not catch her. She reached the Barn out of breath. Saba was lying on his bed in the back room of his office, his arms behind his head. Paula shut the door.

“I’m glad you finally decided to come back,” he said.

“Who is in the patrol, very handsome, a fancy dresser—” She took off the slave’s clothes. “Much taller than you, but lighter-built?”

His head turned toward her. “Younger than me? Bokojin. The Illini Akellar. I can beat him.”

“That’s what he says.” Her satchel was under the bed, and she opened it and took out her robe. “Another one, stocky, older than you, who carries his head—” She thrust her head forward on her shoulders.

Saba watched her from the bed, his head pillowed on his arms. “That’s Leno. Illy’s brother, Merkhiz. I can’t beat him.”

Illy’s brother. He did not look like her at all. There was a blanket folded over the foot of the bed. Paula took it and sat down in the chair between the window and the chest of drawers. “Bokojin said you’d be in perfect shape.” She opened out the blanket.

“Maybe. The trouble with being strong is you never have to learn the tricks. Leno knows every trick there is. You can sleep with me. Don’t you trust me?”

“There isn’t enough room.”

“Maybe I could take Leno, if I didn’t have Ymma to scratch first. I can’t wait to get my hooks into him, that son of a bitch.”

“How is Tanuojin?”

“Not good.”

She pulled the edge of the blanket over her head. The chair was hard as a shelf, but she had no wish to sleep. She rested her head against the back of it. A siren wailed loud along the street below the window and slowly died away. Her legs hurt from climbing stairs. She missed David, whose routine ordered her life in Matuko. Ymma had broken Tanuojin’s body, maybe his mind, maybe all their ambitions: savaged in an alleyway.

“You were right,” Saba said. “We must be crowding close to Machou.”

“You can’t get out of fighting Ymma.”

“No.” He rolled onto his stomach. “Oh, I could, I guess. I could let him go by without revenging Tanuojin. Would you like me to do that?”

“Yes.”

The sound he made in his throat was like a muffled laugh. He turned the back of his head to her. “You’ll do anything.” His loose hair slid over his shoulders, wavy from being clubbed. His back flexed.

“I got in a fight with Leno, once,” he said. He was facing the wall. “In Colorado’s. Before I married Illy. He stretched me out in about fifteen seconds.”

“That was a while ago. He’s older than you are. What about Tanuojin? Can he help you?”

His head swiveled around again, directing his eyes toward her. “If I took him in there, in me?”