Floating Worlds (44 page)

“You’re treating with the Council,” Fisher said.

“I wouldn’t lower myself.”

“That’s enough,” Jefferson said.

Fisher snapped up onto his feet. “I will not—”

“Fisher.”

He turned toward her; the strings showed in his neck. “I—”

“Fisher,” Jefferson said, “sit down.”

Meekly Fisher took his place again. The old woman said, “In the interests of progress, suppose we all go and have lunch, and when we come back this afternoon try to talk like people with wits and objectives and not like little boys in a sandpile.”

Fisher was still watching her, and when she stood he stood. Paula went back to her chair for her jacket. Around her the Styths’ chairs growled and the big men got to their feet. Jefferson, busy with her purse and her candy and scarf, her eyes lowered, was giving no opening for conversation. She headed for the door.

“Don’t touch me,” Fisher snarled.

Paula looked up. Tanuojin was moving away from him.

Saba went out the door. The rest of the Styths followed him. Leno and Tanuojin reached the door simultaneously and bristled at each other. After a moment Tanuojin let Saba’s cadet go first. They went down past Paula’s old office to the way out into the park. Paula squeezed between Tanuojin and the wall.

“What did you find out from Fisher?”

His shoulders moved. “Nothing.” He stretched his legs and went ahead of her out the door to the gulley.

When Paula went back into the building, she found Jefferson in her office, her fingers going like hammers over her keyboard. The bare white walls of the office were stained in streaks, like watermarks. The only thing hanging on them was a long calendar behind the desk. Jefferson looked up from her work.

“Oh. Mendoza. I thought you were Michalski and my diet biscuit.” The old woman rolled her chair away from the keyboard shelf. “Sit down. Have you eaten?”

“We just had lunch.”

Paula sat down sideways in a straight chair. She took her jacket off and draped it over the back. Jefferson said, “Where are your companions?”

“Out in the park cooling off. This will never get us any place as long as Fisher is there.”

“Caleb Fisher is no problem.”

“Not to you, maybe. What did he do, murder his mother and bury her in your backyard?”

Jefferson daubed at her bad eye. Her hair was mushroom-white. She looked old. The door opened for Michalski carrying a cup of coffee on a little tray, which he put on Jefferson’s desk. A white plastic heat-folder steamed beside the cup.

“Mendoza,” he said. “You’ve really gotten bad-tempered. There’s a message for you on the board in the waiting room.” He went out. Jefferson was tearing open the heat-folder. A hot biscuit rolled out onto the tray.

“I’m on a diet.” She nodded at the biscuit. “Now they say my heart will have to be replaced. They’re turning me into a robot piece by piece. We won’t get anywhere unless the Styths are reasonable.”

“They’re reasonable,” Paula said. “As long as it profits them.”

“What do they want?”

“Everything. You might as well give it to them, it will make them easier to handle.”

Jefferson chuckled. She broke the biscuit in half and scattered crumbs across the desktop. “You like to talk in code, Mendoza. Rather like a Styth. I don’t entirely accept your proposition that you’re a new kind of creature.” She ate a mouthful of biscuit, burped, and patted her chest. “All this shooting at people does have to stop.”

Paula hung her arm over the back of the chair. “We need a universal truce.”

“The only people we’re having any difficulty with are your clients, dear girl.”

“Right. So we will arrange a universal truce, and let Saba enforce it.”

Jefferson munched her biscuit. Her bad eye was tearing. Slowly her head began to nod. “Ingenious. I like that, Mendoza. Have you discussed it with them?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Certainly Tanuojin knew. He and Saba had been happy to see her off to this meeting; they wanted to talk alone.

“You gave me to think you want something for yourself.”

“I’d like to be recognized.”

“In what form?”

“I’m the only link you have with the Styths. I’ll stay that. Keep Bunker out of Styth, and stop trying to make contacts behind my back.”

“Have some coffee.” Jefferson reached for her cup.

“No, thanks.”

“What about the Styths? Do they recognize you?”

“I’ll need your help.”

“How?”

Paula said, “We’ll get to that.” She looked around the stained walls of the room, thinking of Bunker again. “I want rank. My own means and place to live, free of either of them. The right to have my son inherit from me.” She felt Bunker hiding somewhere, watching.

Michalski came in again, saying, “Jefferson, two-thirty.” He popped out without pausing. Paula stood, picking up her jacket.

“You’re busy, I guess.”

“My dear, you can’t know. Is there anything else?”

“Give me a listening device. Just an ear, not a transmitter. Something I can hide in Saba’s clothes.”

Jefferson opened a drawer in her desk and took out a three-inch plug like a large book plug. She pulled a wire out of the top. “This will stick to any metal surface.” She pushed the wire back into the plug. “Turn to zero to erase and to ten to play.”

“Thanks.” Paula took it. The white band around the plug was marked with numbers. “I’ll see you in half an hour.” The afternoon meeting started at three.

That session was a repeat of the morning’s, except that Saba walked out. Tanuojin followed him, and Leno unfolded his arms and uncrossed his legs and stood.

“Is there some reason we’re here?”

Fisher gave Paula a sullen, furious look. “You whore,” he said, in a low voice. His gray mustache bristled, and he stalked out the door. Leno looked down at her.

“He sounds like Machou.”

Paula followed him into the hall. Fisher was disappearing into the waiting room midway along it. “Merkhiz, you know all the right words.” Michalski had said something about a message. She went down to the waiting room, where Fisher stood among his aides, having his coat put on and his papercase handed to him.

The message board was just inside the threshold on the wall.

Paula: if you ever come back, I’m living in the Nikoles Building, Room 68, Green Wing. An Chu.

She took the slip of paper off the board and put it in her pocket.

The Styths had gone back to the air cars. Just as she joined them, Leno took off in the two-seater, his second-in-command in the passenger seat. The car hovered overhead a moment and swooped off toward the wall of the dome. The sun was setting and the domelight was coming on. Saba leaned against the door of the yellow Dutch car.

“Why did you leave?” she asked him.

“I’m getting a headache.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

Tanuojin came around the car to her. “I’ll drive.”

They got into the car, Tanuojin in the middle seat, and started toward the East Lock. Below them the lights of buildings glowed through the trees. The heat was off and she began to shiver and reached behind the seat for a car blanket. Saba pressed his hands to his face.

“Can’t you help him?” she asked Tanuojin.

“Not while I’m flying.” He turned to Saba on his other side. “Shall I stop?”

“I’ll be all right.” The big man moved in the cramped seat, his legs bent into the space under the dash. “Is there any place you want to go while we’re here, Paula? Anybody you want to see?”

She shook her head. She would see An Chu later and look for Tony. They were coming to the lock. The orange light was flashing; somebody was in the shaft ahead of them, perhaps Leno.

“What about your father?”

“My father is dead. Are you trying to get me out of the way?”

“Isn’t that nigger-mean,” Tanuojin said. He turned to Saba. “Do you know her father killed himself?”

She stared out the window, angry. Saba said, “No.” His voice was taut. Beyond the window the clear wall of the lock was glowing intensely blue. White arrows flashed in the glare. Tanuojin bumped twice going through the dogleg. Saba winced at the second light contact with the wall.

“Watch where you’re going.”

“Let me drive,” she said to Tanuojin, “and you can help him.”

“No,” they said, in unison.

They flew through the smoky night. A light rain began to fall and Tanuojin turned the blowers on. The lights on the roof of the car shone white on the cottony mist. Saba doubled over, his head in his hands. His breath whistled in his throat. Paula’s muscles were kinked with tension. She made herself relax. Tanuojin shook his head. She frowned at him.

“What’s the matter?”

“My head hurts. Can I land here?”

“Yes.” She bent down and felt along the floor for the switch. The lights on the skids came on. Through the spy window in the floor she could see the ground.

He set the car down on a flat mud plain in the slagheaps. The barren blades of hills stood around them. The rain fell steadily. The ground under them was firm and they had a full pack of oxygen. Paula switched the lights off.

“We can stay here awhile. A couple of hours.”

Neither of them spoke. She looked out the window. The rain tapped on the roof over her head. She did not want to think about her father. She had been thirteen when he died. The rain sluiced down the windows, heavier than before, and she looked at the skids to make sure the ground wasn’t washing away under them. She thought of the listening device in her pocket. The two men with her were as close to her as brothers, but she could not trust them. She had trusted her father. Lonely, she stared out the window. Tanuojin pushed her.

“It’s getting worse. Take us back.”

She changed places with him and drove them back to New Haven.

The wire was sticky. She laid the belt across the top of the chest of drawers, in front of the mirror. In it she could see Saba still asleep in the bed behind her. The windows were heavily shaded. The wire was invisible in this light. She pressed it under the rolled edge of the buckle.

She went out to walk in the wood and got lost. Dark came. She found the stream and followed it through thick trees and brush, but it seemed to take her nowhere familiar. Thrashing her way through a thicket she came up against three strands of wire. She stopped, breathing hard. Ahead of her lay an open field, pale blue in the domelight, that sloped up on her right into an arm of the birch wood. The stream shone through the trees below her. In the distance was a group of buildings she recognized: Halstead’s. Relieved, she climbed through the wire and crossed the field toward the roadhouse.

Both the Committee cars were parked on the roof. She went in the ground door. Although it was a weekend night, the long L-shaped room was half-empty. Farmers took no days off. Kasuk sat at a front table playing Go with an old man in bib overalls. Two or three other Styths drank among the dozen people at the bar. She went over to watch Kasuk play, but just as she reached the table the old man stood up.

“I quit. I know when I’m beaten.” He wore no shirt. His shoulders ended in knobs, his beard hung in thick yellow twists like yarn. “What will it be?”

“Another beer,” Kasuk said. He saw Paula and got to his feet, eager. “Hello. Will you play?”

The old man went to the bar. She shook her head. “No, I want to go home. Did you come down here alone?”

“My uncle is here someplace.” He scanned the room. “So is my brother. I wonder where they went.”

Paula was picking burrs and foxtails out of her clothes and her hair. “Well, drive me home, and then you can bring the car back.”

“My uncle has the key.”

The old man returned with three liter steins of beer. Paula tried to pay him for hers but he refused the money. They sat at the wooden table drinking while Kasuk swept the Go pebbles into the box and shook them through the sorting screen.

“Play with me,” he said to her.

“I’m tired. I’ve been out lost in the wood for five hours.” She licked beer foam off her upper lip. “Where is Tanuojin?”

“Back at the house.”

She raised the stein and drank a long swallow of the beer. Kasuk folded the grid. Her curiosity was sparked. Kasuk was telling her a lie. Tanuojin would never allow his sheltered younger son to go off to a drinking dock; therefore Tanuojin was gone.

Kasuk was staring over her head toward the door, and she twisted around on the bench to see. A girl in a brick-colored jacket slipped into the half-lit room and crossed it to the bar. Kasuk said, “That’s the woman my uncle was talking to.”

The old man put his stein down. “One more game, sonny?”

“Sure.”

Paula gulped the rest of her beer. “If Saba comes in again, hold him for me.” She went out the front door to the yard, spread with the pale blue light. Around the three buildings of the Halstead complex the grass was clipped short, but a hundred feet away the high straw sprang up, crackling dry. She walked slowly out past the barn and the guesthouse. The wind was cold. On the high ground behind the bar, she came on Saba, Junna, and two girls sitting on the ground passing a little bone pipe around.

“I thought I saw you go in,” Saba said. “Where have you been?” He was not wearing the belt with the wire; he was not even wearing a shirt.

“I forgot that it gets dark here.” She sat down beside him. The girls were much nearer Junna’s age than Saba’s. One handed her the pipe. “Which car did you bring?” Relieved, she saw the rest of his clothes on the ground beside him.

“The three-seat.”

“Give me the keys,” she said, “so Kasuk can drive me home.” She sucked on the pipe. The fire was out. She passed the pipe to Junna.

“I’ll take you.” Saba got up, stooping for his shirt and belt.

One girl had struck a match. Junna bent to light the hashish. His heavy hair hung over his shoulders. The two girls were watching him, solemn. Their youth made them all similar. Saba went off through the high grass, slinging his belt around his waist. Paula ran to catch up with him.

“Uncle Saba,” Junna shouted, and Saba wheeled; he kept walking, backward now. Junna cried, “Will you come get us?”

“Walk,” Saba shouted.