Floating Worlds (43 page)

Ybix
reached the intersection. There was a thump like something hitting the padded wall. Paula’s ears stopped up. She felt a sharp deep pain in her diaphragm.

“Marus,” Tanuojin said. “Now hold her. Hold her. Let the field bring her to us.”

The map was a streaming blur of colors. Sril muttered, “I can’t see a thing.” Paula’s nose was bleeding; she went cross-eyed at the fog of blood in the air before her.

“Bakan,” Tanuojin said. “Tell the docking crew to be ready with the new seal.”

Nobody spoke. She was holding her breath. Her temples throbbed.

“Now! Throw it on!”

Bakan shouted, “They’ve got the new seal.”

The crew thundered up a cheer. Tanuojin shouted, “Clear the bridge. Marus, put all the spare energy in the ship into the seal. Junna, take Paula to red-three.”

Junna flung his arms around Paula. “I knew he would do it.” He followed her toward the hatch. “I knew it all the time.” His voice was fresh with relief. She went back to her cabin and shut herself into the wetroom.

“Hot Jesus Christ,” Leno said. He was leaning across the seat in front of her, his cheek flattened against the window. Paula moved into the corner of the seat. If the air bus bounced, he would land in her lap. The other Styths were plastered to the windows on either side of the bus. She stretched her neck to look down the aisle. Saba was in the cockpit, talking to the pilot. She could not see Tanuojin.

She folded one leg up before her. Out the window, thick smoke shrouded the wing of the bus. The sky split. Miles beneath them, red and ocher in the sun, gouged with canyons, the mountains spread across their path. A brown river looped through the humps of the ridges.

“What are they made of? Are they solid?”

“Rock,” she said. “Like moons.” On the far side of the mountains, the funnel-chimneys of smelters sent up plumes of red smoke. The dense air closed around them again. The bus bucked up and down. Beside her head Leno’s claws sank into the foam cushion.

Kasuk dropped into the seat next to hers, on the aisle. “This place is mad. Everything curves the wrong way.”

The bus danced through a crosswind. Paula ducked under Leno’s arm, bending closer to the window. The clouds thinned. Now they were swept away again. The bus soared over the whitened crest of a mountain. A banner of snow blew off the peak.

All around her, the Styths yelled, delighted. Kasuk said, “Does anything live here?”

Paula said, “Insects. Lichens. A few birds.” She put her hand on the window sill. She had forgotten how bright the Earth was.

“What’s that white stuff?” Leno pointed.

“Snow.” She used the word from the Common Speech. “Frozen water.”

He frowned at her. “Frozen water is ice.”

“Snow is water that freezes into crystals and falls from the—” She stared at him, startled. There was no Styth word for sky. “From the upper air,” she said, lamely.

Kasuk said, “All this is natural? No one made it?”

“The Sun made it,” Leno said. “Everything comes from the Sun.”

They were flying toward the Western Sea, red with pollution. The shore was encrusted with robot factories. Feathers of thick smoke streamed past the window. Kasuk leaned over her shoulder.

“Can you imagine flying here? This layer is so thin, and I’ll bet you couldn’t even get a ship into that layer down there.” He pointed to the ground.

Behind Leno, Tanuojin said, “Saba has flown over twenty hours in this Planet.”

Paula looked up past the Merkhiz Akellar’s thick shoulder. “Not in a Styth ship.”

“No. Your friend Jefferson is meeting us in New York. We’re staying in that same place we stayed before. That square house with the short beds.”

New Haven House was the only place where the Committee could put up eighteen people. She turned to look out the window.

Kasuk said, “Paula. Does anything live here?”

They were flying over the brown scummy water of the sea. Patches of oil-eating weeds made islands below them. She said, “That’s alive. There are sharks. Fish, gulls. Snakes.” She turned to look between the seats for Tanuojin. Junna had hauled him to a window at the back of the bus. He stood with one hand on his younger son’s shoulder, holding him away. She put her nose against the window again, looking for something else to explain to them.

Sybil Jefferson met them at the entry port. When the Styths walked out onto the broad ramp down to the ground, a swarm of people with cameras and recorders rushed to surround them. The three rAkellaron withdrew into the shell of their men. The cameras whirred. Jefferson hurried around threatening and cajoling. Paula went to the rail. No one paid any attention to her. She looked out over the city. The autumn air was bright and crisp, the grass champagne-colored, the wood toward the south sorrel and yellow and earth-brown. She put her hands on the rail. She had forgotten or never realized how life teemed here. Everything below her was moving, every leaf, every stem of grass, the birds and all the people stirring. A woman in a white coat was walking away from the building, off across the grass. Paula straightened. The woman turned a corner and disappeared.

“Mendoza,” Jefferson called. “Are you coming?”

Sybil had shooed off the picture men and voice men from the hourlies. With the Styths she was going down the ramp. Paula followed them.

Jefferson pattered along beside Saba. “You see, Akellar, you’re celebrated men.”

Paula went to the rail, searching the ground below them for the woman she had just seen. Tanuojin walked beside her, Sybil Jefferson just beyond. Paula reached across him to pluck at Jefferson’s sleeve.

“Jefferson, I saw Cam Savenia just now. What’s going on?”

“Savenia.” Saba stopped where he was. Leno was going on several feet ahead of them, gawking at the city, and did not seem to be listening. Jefferson kept on walking.

“Was it Cam?” Paula said.

“Possibly,” the old woman said. “The Council wanted to send her as an observer, but we talked them out of it.”

Tanuojin walked in between her and Paula, and his hand dropped onto Paula’s shoulder. “Who did they send?” he asked. Paula pulled his hand away.

“Caleb Fisher,” Jefferson said.

They were coming to the foot of the ramp. Saba walked on Jefferson’s far side. Tanuojin grasped Paula’s wrist, his touch cold as metal. She knew who Caleb Fisher was: a Council member for Mars, once a minister, she thought a defense minister. She said, “Is he a member of the Sunlight League?”

“Ask him.” Jefferson’s lips curled into a stiff smile, but her blue eyes looked angry. “Since you’re so full of snappy questions.”

They went into the parking lot. Tanuojin and Saba circled off into the dark behind a row of cars and stood talking. Jefferson sorted out the rest of the Styths among three Committee buses. Paula leaned against the door of a yellow three-seater car with the Committee emblem on the roof. Kasuk came over to her.

“Is this where you lived before?”

“Yes.” She watched Leno’s men line up at the steps to the biggest bus.

“It’s beautiful.”

“So is Styth,” she said.

“But in another way.”

Jefferson came around the rear end of the three-seater. “Mendoza, we were trying to ease them gently into the notion of the observer.”

“You could have warned me,” Paula said. ’I’d have known how to act.” She touched the arm of the young man beside her. “Jefferson, this is Yekka’s prima son, Kasuk.”

“Hello,” he said. He put his hand out to Jefferson, changed his mind, and drew it back. Jefferson had already reached to shake it. She lowered her hand, but Kasuk, with a Styth’s sense of protocol, stuck his out to her again. Finally they connected, Jefferson looking much amused. Kasuk stood head and shoulders over her. He said, in a false voice, “We are all—”

A shout cut him off. Paula slid past him. At the bus Sril faced Leno’s towering second-in-command. He pushed the Merkhizit, and the taller man shouted, “You little worm,” and jumped on him.

Kasuk took a step toward them. Paula caught his sleeve. Sril and the Merkhizit tumbled over the paved ground, and the other men roared. They rushed out of the bus to watch. Bakan leaped out the door. Midway between the fight and Paula, Junna stood fixed in his tracks. From two directions, Saba and Tanuojin and Leno ran up and scattered the men away.

Jefferson said, “Did I err in the programming?”

“You did,” Paula said.

In the midst of the Styths, Saba had Sril by the arm. The small man’s face was bleeding. He shouted, “You should have heard what he said about
Ybix
, and after we saved them, too.”

Leno turned away. “I’ll never hear the end of that.”

Tanuojin glared at him. “Your crew’s got a big mouth.”

Kasuk moved again, and Paula tightened her grip on his sleeve. The bus swayed back and forth. Saba was herding the crews of the two ships up the steps. His fists on his hips, Leno thrust his blunt head forward at Tanuojin.

“Don’t get me angry, Yekka. I’ll cut you into twenty pieces.”

“I don’t think you can count that high.”

Kasuk laughed. Saba came out of the bus and burst between the two men, driving them apart. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jefferson said. “What was that all about?”

Behind Saba, Tanuojin shot a vicious look at Leno. The Merkhiz Akellar sneered at him. “Nigger eyes.” Tanuojin turned his back. Paula let go of his son’s shirt.

To Jefferson, she said, “Two pegs trying to fit into the same small hole. Where is R.B.?”

“Sitting under the bodhi tree.”

Saba came up to them. “I’m sorry,” he told Jefferson. “It won’t happen again.”

“Is it safe to divide them by family?” Jefferson said.

Paula pulled open the door to the yellow car. “You drive,” she said to Saba, and scrambled across the row of seats to the far side.

“When do we meet this Fisher?” Saba asked.

Paula was staring out the window. They had just left the dome behind them for the thick yellow smoke of the open air. The homing beam blinked blue and red on the dashboard in front of Saba.

In the seat beyond him, Jefferson said, “There’s a meeting Friday morning. Tomorrow.”

“Are you sure it was Dr. Savenia you saw?” the Styth asked, in his language.

Paula shrugged. “She was pretty far away, and her back was to me.”

“I’m not sitting down with anybody from the Sunlight League.”

The air outside was so dense it turned the window into a mirror. She twisted around in the seat to face him. “Why? And why do you automatically assume Sybil doesn’t speak Styth? And that this car isn’t wired? She does. It is.”

He glanced at Jefferson. The old woman picked up her handbag, popped it open, and rummaged in it. Paula said, in the Common Speech, “I don’t suppose you’ve given us separate rooms?”

“There isn’t enough space.” Jefferson fed herself a mint. “Unless you’d take the closet. With the queens and skeletons?”

“I could be bounded in a nutshell. But I think I’d like a window. Where’s the meeting?”

“At our New York office. I was looking forward to seeing your child again.”

“The last time we brought him it was a disaster.”

“Such a charming little boy. He reminded me of you.”

“He isn’t little any more.” They were talking past Saba, and she could not see much of Jefferson at all. She crooked one leg under her. Surrounded by the opaque yellow mist, the car seemed to hang still in the air. Saba reached forward under the steering grips and turned down the heat.

“Children do grow up,” Jefferson said. “After all, it’s been ten years since you left. Ten years would change anybody.” The old woman sucked her candy, her soft white cheek hollowed. “Is he a Styth or an anarchist?”

Paula’s hand rose to her face. Sybil was no longer talking about David. “Neither.”

“In between?”

“Neither.” She glanced at Saba’s profile. “He doesn’t listen to anybody but himself.”

“That’s reasonable,” Jefferson said. She ripped the paper away from the roll of mints. “Have a sweet?”

“No, thanks.”

“Akellar?”

Saba’s gaze slid toward Paula. “Sure,” he said. He reached for a candy.

Caleb Fisher was short and slight, his sparse hair combed across his dome of waxy head. His mustache hid his upper lip. To Paula’s surprise, all three Styths shook hands with him. Afterward Fisher looked as if he wanted to wipe his fingers off. They sat around the long table in the Committee meeting room, with Jefferson at the end and Michalski in the corner taking notes. Dick Bunker was not there. Paula had not seen him since their arrival on the Planet. She knew he was watching.

Jefferson said, “We’ve been very satisfied with the Mendoza Treaty. It’s worth noting that there wasn’t a single violation of the truce in the whole ten years, not by either side.”

Fisher’s little gray toothbrush mustache quivered. Paula watched him through the tail of her eye. In a salesman’s voice, Jefferson was recounting all the virtues of the Mendoza Treaty. Paula guessed Jefferson had been caught out on a thin branch, to have Fisher forced on her. Paula was willing to let them make her out the hero. Now Fisher was leaning across the table.

“Miss Jefferson, I have to insert one small comment.”

Paula raised her head. “I thought you were an observer.”

“I am.”

“Then observe, and keep the comment in back.”

In the big chair on her right, Saba put his hand out to quiet her. Fisher’s mustache jerked up like a curtain from his little teeth. “This negotiation is in the interests of the Council. I am here for the Council.” He straightened up, looking at Saba. “Maybe there have been no technical violations of the truce, but the past ten years, the years of this much-acclaimed Mendoza Treaty, have been the bloodiest between the Styths and the Middle Planets in centuries. Only fifteen months ago there was an awful raid against a Martian colony in the Asteroids—civilians, women and children—carried off into an unspeakable life of slavery.”

“I have no treaty with the Martians,” Saba said.

“We have a right to insist on minimum standards of human decency.”

Paula shoved her chair back and walked away across the room. There were no windows; book racks like honeycombs covered the walls. At the closet door, she tried the latch. It was locked. Saba said, “What’s your minimum standard for murder?” His voice had a short-tempered edge. In the next chair Tanuojin sat picking at his claws, his eyes on his hands. Around the corner of the table from Jefferson, Leno looked bored: their observer. He could barely speak the Common Speech.

Fisher said, “I beg your pardon.”

“I’m talking about the Sunlight League,” Saba said.

“The Sunlight League?”

“Sure.” Saba’s hand struck the table. “It’s too bad we didn’t bring some pieces of the man you sent to murder me.”

“We are not responsible for the actions of private citizens.”

The air smelled bitter. Behind the Styths, Paula watched Tanuojin’s long hands flex. Jefferson was scratching her throat, her pale eyes on Fisher.

The Martian said, starchy, “We will not accept a new treaty that does not settle the issue of slavery. That’s absolutely fundamental.”

“I’m not treating with you,” Saba said. “I’m treating with her.” His hand jerked toward Jefferson.