Floating Worlds (42 page)

Without Pedasen she had to do all the work in her house by herself. She hated the other slaves, who hated her, and would not let them inside her door. If something broke, Sril or Bakan fixed it for her, but usually the floor was crunchy with grit and cobwebs hung from the ceiling.

She was going around the front room wiping the dust off the flat surfaces when David came in. His upper lip was split and swollen; he had been fighting again. Her chest tightened with short temper and she threw the rag down.

“You know, I’m beginning to forget what you really look like.”

He climbed onto the swing couch. His narrow slanted eyes were stony. “Maybe I just won’t come back ever again, maybe you’d like that better.”

“I’d like you to broaden your interests.”

“It’s your fault.”

“My fault.”

“Because you’re a dirty nigger.”

She started down to her heels. Her son leaned toward her, his head stuck forward. “You aren’t my mother. You’re just a dirty old slave. My real mother was a Styth, like everybody else’s mother.”

Her face flushed with heat. Her hands were trembling and she chafed them together hard. “Your mother is me, whether you appreciate it or not, and if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be here living this easy life with the leisure to beat people up.” His hostile eyes shifted. Now he was staring over her shoulder. She said, “If it hadn’t been for your dirty nigger mother, your clean Styth father would have sold us both for slaves long ago.”

“That isn’t true!”

He flew out of the couch toward her, his fist raised. She swiped his hand aside. “Don’t you touch me, you little brat—” He was not small; he was already nearly her height. “All you can do is fight.”

“I hate you. And you aren’t my mother.” He raced down the hallway. The back door slammed.

She took her notebook to the kitchen, where it was warm. Too jittery to work, she sat at the table drawing on the scarred white top with her stylus.

“Paula?” Saba shouted, in the front of the house.

She raised her head. He came heavy-footed down the hall and tramped across the kitchen to the far side of the table from her. “What’s the matter with you? Why did you tell him I’m going to sell him?”

David lingered in the doorway behind him. She laid her hands flat on the table. “The shining knight to the rescue.”

“Look.” Saba gestured toward the boy behind him. “The other boys tease him. Maybe he should live with Boltiko.”

“No.” She rushed up onto her feet. “No.”

“You dirty nigger kundra,” David said.

Saba let out a half-spoken oath. He got the boy by the arm, whirled him around, and spanked him. David squawked. Paula’s wobbling legs put her down hard on the bench. Saba dropped him, and David threw a furious glance at him and bolted.

“That was edifying,” Paula said. Her throat was tight.

“I hope so. That’s what you’re supposed to do, not threaten to sell him.” He sat on the end of the bench and reached for her notebook. “He has to learn to fight sometime. Look how small he is. He’ll never get anything without fighting for it.”

“He says—” She cleared her throat. “I’m not his real mother.”

He laughed. The notebook was open before him; the pages were covered with the cursive script of the Middle Planets, which he could not read. He tapped the lone Styth symbol on the page: the major Sa she used short for his name. “What’s this?”

“Notes. For a new treaty with the Committee.”

“What makes you think I’ll want a new treaty?” He looked her curiously in the face. “You can’t take Vida with you, if you go back to live in the Earth.”

“Item,” she said. “You need money. As usual. Item. The quickest way to get money is to go to the Middle Planets. Therefore. You’ll get a new treaty.”

“Item.” Saba shut the notebook. “If you go back to the Earth, you’ll be just little Paula Mendoza again, but here, you do what nobody else can.” He leaned on his elbows over the table, his black eyes at her. “Stop scaring Vida. If he didn’t love you, you wouldn’t matter to him.” He went out the hall to the front door.

Sril played the ulugong with his eyes shut, beating out the round mellow notes with the heels of his hands. Paula turned around. Some of the pornographic posters on the walls of the Tank had been there since her first voyage. One woman, life-sized, her legs spread wide, had been chewed by darts into gaping holes that finally made her modest.

“Mendoz’,” Sril said. “Go get your music-stick.”

“I left it in Matuko.”

“Damn. Why?”

She made no answer. David had demanded the flute, to keep safe until she came back. The Go set was in the cabinet under the hatch, and she took the grid out of its clamps and the box of pebbles out of the cubbyhole. She looked around for someone to play with.

“Kasuk. Play Go with me.”

Tanuojin’s son was just coming in the hatch. “What?”

“Play Go with me.”

“I don’t know how.” He scrambled across the Tank toward her, still awkward in the free fall. She dodged fluently out of his way.

“I’ll teach you.”

“It had better not take effort.” He watched her put the grid before her in the air and shake the pebble box of stones. “I don’t believe in effort.”

She taught him the game. Sril’s soft bell-like music played in her ears. Already she missed her flute. Bakan and Marus came into the Tank and threw darts. They had only reached cruising speed during the high watch, five hours before, and the crew were still settling into their routines.

“Where is
Ebelos
?” she asked Kasuk.

“Off our bow. You can see her from the window in the Beak.”

Ebelos
was Leno’s ship. Machou had insisted the Merkhiz Akellar go with them to the Earth for the new treaty conference. Tanuojin had tried to argue around it. Paula suspected Dick Bunker’s influence in Machou’s sudden interest in the Middle Planets; the Committee was trying to get around her. She set a pebble on the board. Kasuk played slowly, thoughtful, his eyes on the board. Shorter than Tanuojin, heavyset, he seemed painfully shy.

“Kak.” His brother Junna dove through the hatch. His hair was growing out. Sometime during the mission he would be clubbed. “Gemini says—”

Kasuk’s head turned, and the rest of his body followed, rolling straight. “Pop said you shouldn’t come in here.”

“Gemini says you’re supposed to memorize the interact codes and get on the spark to
Ebelos
and confirm,” Junna said.

Kasuk looked at her. “I have to go.”

“I heard him.”

The young man doubled over and swooped away to the hatch. To Junna he said, “He told you not to come in here,” and went out without waiting for a reply. Paula herded the pebbles into the box. His eyes on the posters, Junna loitered in the middle of the Tank.

Sril said, “What’s wrong? Isn’t Diddums-widdums allowed to look at cunts?” The other men laughed. Junna’s eyes flashed. He swung around toward them, rope-thin, gawky, and caught a faceful of jeers.

“You’d better leave fast, Diddums, before those cracks attack.”

She put the Go game away and went out. All down the corridor she could hear them teasing Junna and his furious replies.

Without her flute, she had nothing to fill the hours when her friends were on watch. She sat in the Beak, trying to make out the planets among the stars. Saba knew hundreds of the stars by name. The red flame of the Sun burned near the edge of the window.
Ebelos
, Leno’s ship, was long and hump-backed. She flew below
Ybix
, sometimes above her, just close enough for Paula to read the markings on her hull. She wrote a letter to David, to send when they reached the Earth, and she daydreamed.

When she went to the library in the high watch she found Tanuojin in there with Kasuk. In the hatchway, she said, “Do you mind if I come in?”

“No.” Tanuojin had a workboard on his knee and was writing on it and did not look up. She went past them into the back of the room. The books were all kept in niches, their tails out. She went along reading the titles written on the butt ends of the tapes.

Behind her, Tanuojin said, “So if a body absorbs energy—” his stylus scraped on the worksheet, “its mass is increased by the amount of energy, E, divided by light squared, at the rate…” He scribbled. She found an old book of legends and took it out.

“Are you listening to me?” Tanuojin said sharply.

She turned. Kasuk mumbled something. He lowered his eyes; he had been looking at her. Tanuojin knocked the workboard aside.

“Why do I waste my time on you? You’ll never amount to a half-pitch.”

She started toward the hatch. Kasuk beat her through it. The workboard floated toward her, and she caught it.

“Damned stupid brat,” Tanuojin said.

“He’s very good at Go.”

“Whenever I try to teach him something he drifts off into that dream world of his.”

She held the workboard out to him, and he took it and shoved it into a rubber clip on the wall. He avoided her eyes. “Go away, Paula.”

She left, the book of legends in her hand.

She and Saba lived in the same cabin. She slept during the high watch and he slept during the low watch. Just after one bell, while he was getting undressed and she was dressing, she said, “What kind of a sailor is Kasuk?”

“Fair. When he pays attention.”

“Why is Tanuojin so hard with him?”

“Why are you so easy with Vida?” He plunged head-first into the wetroom. The round door swung idly. His voice sounded through the open hatch of the dryer in the wall below the wetroom. “It isn’t that he’s hard, he expects too much.”

The wetroom hissed. Paula unhooked the bed from the wall and shook it out. The thick furry nap attracted dust. Glistening wet, Saba came through the dryer into the open room.

“He’s crushing him,” she said.

“Jesus,” Saba said. “Ever since the crumb was a baby, whenever he’s fallen down and scratched his knees, Tanuojin’s been right over him, giving him hell and healing him up. What do you expect?” He shook his hair back, floating in the air. Paula fastened up the front of her overalls. He said, in another voice, “I could use some help getting to sleep.”

“I’ll find you some sweet music in the library.” She went up the tubular room to the hatch into the corridor.

“What, you only fuck women now? That’s bad for you, Paula, it gives you diseases.”

“You’d know.”

“Maybe you’ve given sex up entirely, like Tajin.”

“You’ve destroyed my trust in men.” She wheeled over the latch in the round doorway, swinging her body the other way as a counter. Saba was wrapping himself in the bed.

“I’m surrounded by celibates.”

She laughed. “Dream.”

Ahead, above the hazy sprinkling of the Pleiades, which the Styths also called the Net, great Jupiter was slowly becoming visible. The Sun lit only a crescent shape along her flank. Every few watches Paula went into the Beak to see the giant planet and the little pearls of her moons. They would swing around Jupiter for the energy to reach the Earth.

When they had gone nearly two hundred watches from Uranus,
Ebelos
split a crystal in her heart engine, and both ships decelerated back to spacepoint. Paula spent the time in the wetroom, being sick.
Ebelos
’s engines were built in a single train. When one failed, they all failed, and in the course of slowing down, three more crystals cracked.
Ybix
coupled with her, belly to belly, sealed together in an elastic web. Leno’s crew was brought into
Ybix
, and Saba, Tanuojin, Leno, and his second officer crowded into Saba’s cabin and spread out charts of
Ebelos
’s engines.

The lights were so dim Paula saw the men only as vague shapes. The cold made her shiver. They had turned the life systems down to save energy. Someone lit a crystal lamp. Saba turned, his face white in its light.

“That’s my wife, who does not clean up.” He batted a floating book tape away from him.

They put the lamp under the chart and leaned over it. Paula moved along the curved wall. The chart of lines and circles and colored dots looked like a choreograph.

Tanuojin said, “We’re falling into Jupiter’s influence. How long will this take?”

“Six hours,” Leno said. He wore a pressure suit; his arm was ham-sized. His finger moved over the drawing between him and Saba. “We’ll have to start here. Unscrew the hood and the hood mounting, set the ancillary crystal, take out this coupling, set the two behind it, and replace the coupling and set the crystal in its head. Reset the timing. It needs two engineers and someone to hold the lamp and the tools.”

Saba’s head bobbed. The light shone on the curve of his cheekbone. “You and I can do it.”

Leno turned to his second officer. “You’re dismissed. Go get some sleep.”

“Yes, Akellar.”

Another man had come in behind the others. She could not see who it was. He gave something to Tanuojin. The tall man swung around, his face turning into the light. “You’d better do this a little faster than six hours. We’ll reach primary Jupiter in five.” He left.

Leno was rolling up the chart. Paula went down the room, into the warmth of the crystal lamp. Saba said, “I need a volunteer from my watch, to go in with us.”

Near the hatch, in the dark, the other man said, “I’ll go.” It was Kasuk.

“Good,” Saba said. “Get into your suit.”

Leno clipped down the ends of his chart and fit it into a tube. When Kasuk had gone, he said, “You know, Saba, I wouldn’t expect this even of you.”

“Expect what?”

“If
Ybix
were Yekka’s, he would have run behind me, when my engine failed, until I blew out my ship, or paid his ransom, or turned my ship over to him—whatever he wanted.”

“Tanuojin is one of the best officers in the fleet.”

“I didn’t deny that. One of my own friends wouldn’t jeopardize his ship for my sake.”

Saba said, “Are you coming to your point?”

In the pressure suit Leno looked two times Saba’s size. He said, “I think I’ve passed it.”

“Let’s go.” Saba turned toward Paula, above him in the dark. “Tell Tanuojin I’m taking Kasuk with me.”

“Hurry, will you? I’m freezing.”

“Don’t worry. If we don’t do this right, we’ll pretty soon be as hot you want.” He laughed.

Jupiter made the space around her seethe. The two ships slipped deeper into the turbulence. The seal between them cracked and broke, and they drifted apart. Saba, Leno, and Kasuk were stranded in
Ebelos
, floating away toward the giant Planet. Paula went to
Ybix
’s bridge. It was mobbed with men. The radiation from Jupiter jammed the communicators. There was no way to reach the men in
Ebelos
.

Tanuojin, in the cage, sent
Ybix
chasing the other ship. When he tried to couple with her,
Ebelos
wobbled and rolled away. He pursued, and the bigger ship sheared toward
Ybix
, and he had to pull
Ybix
up so hard Paula ran her head into the wall.

“We can’t do it,” someone said, behind her: one of Ebelos’s crew. “The old dragon’s burned a couple more.”

Paula shook her head, dazed. Sril’s arm slipped around her waist. “Hold on, Mendoz’.”

The darkened bridge was faintly lit by the green cube of the holograph. The images of the two ships were bright yellow. The radiant Planet was interfering with the sensors and the images began to flutter. She put her hand on Sril’s arm.
Ebelos
broke into three separate pieces in the map and each piece shivered into a dozen outlines, out of register.

Tanuojin put his hand out of the cage. “Bakan. Throw a schema of the Jovian fields into the holograph.”

Sril muttered in his throat. In the holograph the images of the ships had dissolved into hazy blurs. Suddenly
Ybix
’s kite shape was surrounded by a ring of identical images. If
Ebelos
hit her, she would break
Ybix
in half. But now
Ebelos
was sailing in her own crowd of ghosts. Paula rubbed her eyes. Junna had come in beside her.

Bakan said, “I have the field schema.” A three-color diagram appeared in the holograph, showing the curving blue and orange space of Jupiter. The multiplying images of the ships sailed through it. A blue curl brushed one of
Ebelos
’s ghosts, without effect, and touched another in the ring. The ship rolled over, and the seven different pictures of her blurred and ran in confusion.

“Marus,” Tanuojin said. “Bring her up to zero-eight.”

Paula’s eyes hurt from trying to follow the chaos in the holograph.
Ebelos
seemed to be rolling over onto her back. Tanuojin gave Marus a stream of orders in a voice without inflection. The incoherent light that seemed to be
Ybix
settled toward one of the images of
Ebelos
. She wondered how he knew which was which.

“It’s no use,” a strange voice murmured, over her shoulder. “He can’t do this.”

Paula was leaning on Sril, her hand fisted in his sleeve. He gave her a slight hug. He heard them. The low voices whispered behind her.

“
Ybix
can’t support this many men too much longer.”

“What’s her capacity—eighteen?”

“Look how he’s wasting energy.”

Junna flung his head back. He and Paula were within arm’s distance of each other. His eyes shone. With one hand he raked aside his thick floating hair. The blue and orange fields lapped and made a whorl of space that intersected the map cube. There were eight things that looked like
Ebelos
. Three of them fell through the whorl and went on with no change, but the fourth hit the shifting helix of the fields and rebounded. Sril let out a hoarse gasp.

“Marus!” Tanuojin cried. “Reverse—eight-zero. Now! Pick her up, damn it, if you drop her I’ll kill you.”

“He’ll kill us all,” the strange murmur said behind her. “We have to grab this ship.”

Paula got hold of Junna’s hand. He gave her another desperate look and turned his face back toward his father in the cage.

The schema of the fields, drawn by the computer inside the ship, was the only steady image in the map. Ebelos was a long blur that filled half the cube, and
Ybix
was in many parts, sparkling like a star. Tanuojin was staring at the cube. He gave Marus orders and faithfully Marus obeyed him. A piece of
Ybix
moved down through the orange toward
Ebelos
. The colors of the fields deepened as the Planet’s gravity compressed the space around it.
Ebelos
’s blurred mass passed across the intersection between the orange and the blue. Her many images rolled head over tail. Paula’s eyes burned from trying to make sense out of the map. She rubbed them with her free hand. Junna’s fingers were clamped around hers so tightly she could feel the papery new growth of his claws. She thought of the tumbling men in
Ebelos
.